For companies making outbound calls, automated dialer software helps in increasing the productivity of the business. With so many dialers available in the market, it is necessary to choose the right dialer software that is compatible with your contact center software. Predictive dialer software, with its predictive analytical capabilities of slowing down or increasing the call rates based on various factors like agents’ availability, call drop ratio, agent wait time, average wrap-up time, and other statistical data. This helps in reducing the call drops and maximizes agents’ productivity.
What is a Predictive Dialer?
A call center Predictive Dialer software is a type of dialer which is used to throw bulk calls from a contact list based on multiple contact filters. Predictive dialer calls numbers automatically and can help agents screen for busy signals, voicemail, no answers, and disconnected numbers. As per the Business Goals, the filters can be customized for a specific outbound dialing strategy. The predictions made by the call centre predictive dialer are based on the historical data of the agent, using statistics and probability. The chances of the predictions being wrong are very less, the dialer does not wait for the agent to be actually free before making the call, again to boost productivity.
The Call Center Predictive Dialer Features
With so many predictive dialers in the industry, choosing the right one is not an easy task. But to make your lives easier, we have compiled a list of must-have predictive dialer technologies to be sure that you have what you paid for.
Answering Machine Detection
Predictive dialer software mindlessly calls one number after another and the answering machine detects if there is a busy tone, call disconnected, call answered by a machine, or call not answered before routing it to the right agent. To ensure higher call connect rates, a predictive dialer will route the calls that are answered by humans to reduce agents’ idle time.
Lead Segmentation
The predictive dialer software should have the capability of segmenting the Leads/contacts into different segments so different dialing strategies can be worked out as per each segment.
CRM Integration
Manually uploading Lead/ Contact data can be excruciating for Call center managers. CRM Integration can help them save a lot of headaches and time to kick off their outbound dialing strategies. This saves call center supervisors from manual Contact list upload and streamlines Call Center Predictive Dialing.
Dial Time Zone Restrictions
When you work in multiple geographies, the supervisors can predefine the time zone in which dialing needs to be restricted for specific country time zones.
Retry Logic
To optimize the Predictive Dialing strategy, retry logics are configured in the dialer for every unsuccessful call. Different retry strategies can be set for different outcomes. An unanswered call can be retried after 1 hour, busy after 30 minutes, etc., with a predefined number of retries. The supervisors can define the retry time against each call disposition to ensure that no contact is missed in the lead list.
Pacing Ratio
With a predictive dialer algorithm, you can define the number of calls to be dialed out per agent to reduce the call drop ratio. The dialer analyzes the past interactions and average handling time to adjust the pacing ratio. The algorithm tracks several things like average call durations, the number of agents available, real-time hit rate, etc. to ensure optimum utilization of resources.
Lead Prioritization
For any lead, the supervisors can assign a priority number. For instance, if there are 3 leads, priority for Lead 1 is set at 1, Lead 2 and Lead 3 are set at 2, Lead 1 with the highest priority will be dialed out first and it will follow the sequence.
Now, for Lead 2 & 3, the lead priority is the same, the supervisors can assign lead weightage. The dialer will dial out the lead with more weightage first.
(Also Read: Why do you need a Dialer Software for Outbound Call Center?)