Predictive Dialer understanding how they work
A brief introduction: Predictive dialers can be used as an important tool in every business and company that have a large list of customer and have products and services to promote. Predictive dialer software is a package designed to operate a system capable to automatically dial a long list of phone numbers that connect with agents that have your number assigned for several reasons.
For instance, if I am offering a credit card Visa, Master Card or American Express I have all your information registered in a database and I the system will can you automatically and then if I am the agent I receive the call that you answered and if offer this service. Predictive dialer software is specially developed with the purpose to operate in large call centers and handle hundred calls simultaneously. There are many vendors and developers of this product in India, England, China, Japan, Australia, Russia, United States and Canada. There are also telephone central manufacturer that sell this kind of software.
Functioning: Predictive dialer software are developed with a complex algorithm so that agents who are logged in the system and available to receive calls can do it. The process is very straight forward for users (agents) who dont know what is happening they only know they are answering the phone and everything is OK. Sometimes the dialer makes more call attempts than the quantity of agents logged to the system but it can also be optimized and administrated in a better way by the predictive dialer software. Basically, if you have in your call center 100 agents answering phones the predictive dialer will dial at least 2 calls for each available agent.
Kind of predictive dialer software (system): There are different types of predictive dialer software or dialer system. Something you should have in mind that all of them have the same function but there are some variations according to the manufacturer, platform, software and delivery methods. You can find that some of them are only based on software, hardware, smart and hosted dialers. All of them has almost the same capacity and do the same functions and you can adapt them to the needs of your business or call center. In the recent years there are some innovations that are more cost effective solutions thanks to the revolution of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). These solutions have the advantages that can combine a hardware that can be a voice modem combine with a powerful software that can automatically response calls and make a lot of revolutionary things. It is something that many companies are using as a mixed solution of predictive dialer system.
What about soft dialers? Soft dialers are basically based on software only without hardware. The advantage is that the cost is very low and the architecture is very flexible. The disadvantage is that youll have a higher rate of errors and lower capacity of calls, you usually see this products in medical industry, like hospitals or doctors services.
What about hard dialers? These are telephone systems that perform call progress analysis and make answering machine detection. The advantage is that you dont have to use several telephony connections and the main disadvantage is the high cost it may represent.