Predictive dialer software is the most well-known outbound dialer tool among all – experienced users and newbies. When it comes to discussing outbound dialers, people remember the predictive dialer at the first place – why is it so? Let’s find it out.
What is predictive dialer software? How does it work? What are the differences between it and other outbound dialers? Where to pick it up and how to use it?
All questions are going to be answered.
Article Breakdown
What is a predictive dialer?
A predictive dialer is an outbound dialer tool that is used to perform massive outbound calls for the purpose of telemarketing, lead generation, or old customer base updating. In other words, a predictive dialer is one of the auto dialing tools that use a specific algorithm to automatically perform outbound calls and connect them to agents for further processing.
Predictive dialing mode is the most popular auto-dialing mode because it provides the best performance results compared to other auto dialing tools.
First of all, let’s introduce all available auto dialing tools you can find on the market. As you could guess, this list includes predictive dialing mode, power dialing mode, preview dialing mode and progressive dialing mode. Let’s compare their performance rates to understand what is the difference in the capabilities.
Predictive dialing mode can perform around 100 calling attempts per hour with 75% of contact rate (contact rate measures the percentage of calls that are answered by a real prospect).
Power dialing mode performs around 75 calling attempts per hour with contact rate not less than 50%, but it can be significantly higher with the use of high-quality contact lists.
Progressive dialing mode is difficult to measure in the case of its performance, as it can use different dialing ratios – the number of calls performed simultaneously. Nonetheless, it is a bit faster than the Power dialer, but still not as fast as the Predictive dialing mode. Its contact rate is in most cases similar to the power dialer.
Preview dialing mode is used for specific purposes, mostly to provide personalized customer service, and never for cold sales, but still it performs around 50 calling attempts per hour with a contact rate similar to Power dialer.
To compare the efficiency and productivity of auto-dialers to manual dialing, let’s say that the performance rates for manual dialing are never higher than 30 calls per hour on average with 30-35% of contact rate.
How does the predictive dialing mode work?
Predictive dialing mode is the fastest dialing mode available, but how it reach such high performance rates? Well, predictive dialing mode is also a dialing mode with the most advanced calling algorithm – it permanently measures some vital metrics of agent performance, such as average call duration and contact rate to start calling new phone numbers from the contact list when previous calls are still in progress. This means that agent can still keep handling ongoing calls while the system will try to find a new live call exactly for the moment when the previous one will be over.
This provides agents with one of the highest occupancy rates possible – up to 85%. To make it clear, occupancy rates refer to the percentage of time agents spend on handling calls and call-related issues. In other words, predictive dialer software is the best way to provide your agents with so many calls they would have never gotten without using it.
What is the purpose of using a predictive dialer?
As Predictive dialer is the fastest auto dialer, its main purpose is to perform outbound telemarketing campaigns and generate cold sales. Cold calls are the main type of calls the predictive dialer is used for, but it can also be used for lead generation purposes, and as a tool to update your old contact bases – again, it follows from its high productivity.
It is not suitable for warm calls because of its algorithm that is focused on generating as many calls as possible, while you need to process warm leads with higher accuracy and spend a lot of time on them.
What are the cons of outbound predictive dialer?
There are a few cons of a predictive dialer when it comes to using it for some other purposes than it is designed for. First of all, you have to understand that the algorithm of predictive dialer doesn’t allow it to operate with less than 5 agents online – it will just generate too many calls to be processed, and this will cause nothing but a trouble.
Secondly, predictive dialer can cause issues with dropped calls – it happens when the call is already answered by a client, but the agent isn’t yet linked to the call – so a client hangs it up. In some countries, it is illegal to get more thna 3 or 5% of dropped calls, or you will lose your right to do telemarketing and you will also get fined.
Finally, predictive dialer doesn’t allow agents to leave cold voicemail drops as power dialer does, which means you lose one of the methods to get callbacks on your telemarketing calls.
Conclusion
As you can see, outbound predictive dialer is the fastest auto-dialer when it comes to dialing pace, and it is also the best automated telemarketing tool for cold calling. Thus, if you want to boost your cold calling performance and generate cold sales, this is the tool you should look for.