If you’re a business owner or an agent in an organization that deals in making outbound calls to customers, then there’s a possibility that you’ve heard about predictive dialers. Over time, several developments have been introduced to improve engagements between customers and business agents. The main aim of these developments is to increase conversion in a business by generating leads through various marketing strategies. These tools make it easier to do follow-ups to convert leads into clients.
As a result, software such as the predictive dialer was developed to help agents easily reach a large number of customers over a short period. When you consider a traditional calling system, you’ll notice that dial time was longer and it ate into the talk time. On the other hand, a predictive dialer seeks to reduce the dial time and increase the talk time.
What It Is
As the name suggests, it’s an automated dialer that makes outbound calls on behalf of agents. It will call a number until it detects a connection before passing it to the available agent. The predictive dialer systems can predict when the agent will be available and will start dialing towards the end of the current call, which significantly reduces the wait time.
What sets predictive dialers apart from other automated dialers is the feature where it only makes calls answered by real people. It filters out voice mails, busy signals, and fax machines. It also makes several calls at once so that any available agent is immediately connected to a customer.
How It Works
A predictive dialer uses algorithms in determining the average answer time and agent availability to adjust its dial time and synch it with these rates.
The dials run parallel with agent availability, which means there’s a very low chance of a dialed number not having an agent to attend to it. It also ensures that agents are supplied with a constant flow of calls without manually dialing the numbers.
The predictive analyses made by the dialer on the agent availability are what enable it to make so many calls at a time. In addition, some service providers like 800 Service have other features combined with predictive dialers that can regulate the number of calls being made if the call center is busy.
The dialer also determines, using previously collected data, the possibility of the call being answered. For example, if there’s only a 50% possibility of a call being answered at a particular time of the day, then the predictive dialer can assign two calls to an agent at a time. Towards the end of the call, the second contact will already have been dialed. Therefore, the agent won’t have to wait for long before getting another call.
With these features, predictive dialers have become a crucial part of any business. It has offered a lifeline to many businesses to quickly connect with clients and generate leads. The predictive dialer is part of a vast customer service network and has several benefits to your business.
Benefits of A Predictive Dialer
There are several benefits that a predictive dialer can offer to your business. When you acquire a predictive dialer, your agents will be more engaged with customers, and your business will benefit in the following ways:
- Boosts Call Volumes
A predictive dialer may prove to be very crucial for any business that wants to generate high numbers in terms of leads and customers. The software makes successive calls in a short period which ensures that many people are reached. It also filters out unanswered calls, voice mails, and busy signals, which means the calls being made have a high chance of being received.
By boosting call volumes, a business is likely to increase organic traffic to their websites and generate more leads for their products.
- Improves Team Productivity
A good predictive dialer will increase your team’s productivity by ensuring that agents are engaged at every moment. By auto-dialing and connecting customers to available agents, it ensures that there’s no time wasted. In addition, agents can fully concentrate on responding to clients as everything else has been taken care of by the dialer.
Predictive dialers also eliminate cases of voice mail and other non-organic responses helping agents only engage with real people. In turn, this will ensure that agents make as many sales as possible and solve real issues, which increases their productivity. Agents also can attend to numerous calls in a day, unlike when manual dialing took away some of their talk time and affected the number of calls they could make.
- Accurate Monitoring
Business managers can use reports from predictive dialers to monitor the performance of agents accurately, even when they’re far away. The integrated calling and recording systems usually allow the managers to monitor live conversations between clients and agents. They can then assess the quality of the call by measuring it against the parameters set.
These monitoring data can later be used to offer agents feedback, award, or training on what to improve regarding their engagement. Agents can also record their interactions, which can determine the buyers’ attitudes and track trends.
These metrics will give the company an excellent basis to improve its customer engagements. They can also design strategies to help achieve and maintain a positive trend among all the agents.
- Manages Client Database
A predictive dialer can help create a client’s database for future references. Such data include customers who don’t want to be called and contacts that won’t generate any leads. This will help your business maintain a healthy database of clients who are beneficial to the business. The rest are sieved out to create space for other potential leads.
Other than sieving contacts, a predictive dialer will determine what number to redial when they’re busy or if the system doesn’t receive an answer. The data managing tools help reduce the need for managers and agents to write down numbers that they feel should be called again. The dialer does all that for them.
- Reduces Chances of Errors
When dealing with numerous calls, there’s the possibility of human error and negligence kicking in. For example, a scenario may occur where an agent contacts a client who was already contacted, a number is misdialed, or a call goes unanswered. Such cases usually occur in a busy call center, which may impact your business’s overall performance.
However, when you’re using a predictive dialer, it helps manage the call center and eliminates these errors. With the automation of the call center, a call will be transferred to the available agent. Once it’s attended to, the number won’t be redialed unless the need arises, which can be done manually.
- Helps Increase Sales
High call volume and traffic don’t always indicate a high number of sales closed. This can also be the case with a predictive dialer. Helping a business make many outbound calls in a day doesn’t necessarily translate to many sales being closed. However, it helps in setting a basis through which your agents can close sales.
Remember that a predictive dialer can filter out non-organic and non-responsive contacts from the contact list and focus only on contacts that have the potential to generate leads and become buyers. It also helps make many outbound calls in a day compared to the manual ways of making calls.
With these features, predictive dialers can help your team to close as many deals as possible. Of course, every call it makes isn’t a sale, but it’s a potential to be converted into a sale. For example, if 100 calls are made in a day by one agent, the business has the potential to complete 100 sales per day.
- Reduces Bias
The impact of bias is greater when agents make calls manually because some may choose to avoid making particular calls. Such cases can significantly affect lead generation and customer experience, as many issues may be left unattended for a long time.
However, with predictive analysis, agents don’t choose what to attend to and what to avoid. The predictive dialer will make a call for your agents when they’re near the end of another call. By being assigned to any call, agents can attend to customers collectively without any bias. By doing this, issues are addressed as they arise, which can transform to higher lead generation.
- Improved Compliance
Several regulations usually control how call centers should operate to protect consumers from scams and annoying calls. The penalty of breaching these rules could amount to heavy fines, which adversely affect a business. However, these regulations don’t actively provide companies with a list of numbers that they’re prohibited from communicating.
Therefore, a business must maintain a database of people they’re not allowed to call to avoid being fined. However, this list may grow daily with more people blocking calls from your company. Unfortunately, it’s hard for agents to observe these as they may forget or mix the list of people to call or not.
Your business must acquire a predictive dialer to avoid such cases and maintain compliance with regulations and privacy protection. The dialer will filter out these contacts and only dial those your business is allowed to.
- Cuts Operational Costs
When you invest in predictive dialers, you’ll end up cutting so many operational costs in the long run. First, the dialer will cut the marketing expenses by reducing the list of people you’ll call to only those who are responsive to your products. A predictive dialer can significantly cut costs related to on-call rates, especially for international calls.
Secondly, with the software, you can get the same workload achieved as before but with less workforce. This is because the dialer reduces the dial time and increases the calls’ precision, meaning a high number of outbound calls are made each day. A business can then cut down its wage load by laying off some agents, which will help them save a lot on finances.
Finally, the dialer helps to reduce extra costs that arise due to human error and negligence. Such costs include fines and penalties incurred by calling prohibited numbers.
- Improves Customer Satisfaction
Predictive dialers help employees connect with clients quickly. By reducing the dial time and increasing the talk time, businesses can understand clients better and create a fantastic experience for their customers. Also, customers are more likely to be responsive when they talk to agents about a product than when reading product descriptions.
Through calls, managers can also collect more data about their customers, such as their addresses and feedbacks. These data can help the business create customer journey maps and modify its operations to suit customer expectations.
Moreover, predictive dialers filter the list of customers and only call those who are prospective buyers. This way, the business can focus on these particular groups and create a fantastic experience for them rather than focusing on many people, some of whom aren’t interested in the business. Together with the short wait time it takes between calls, these features significantly improve customer satisfaction.
- Easier to Use
Compared to traditional phones, predictive dialers are easy to use for both the business and even the customers. First, the dialer is usually not limited to locations or service providers, which means that your agents can reach potential clients wherever they are. In addition, the predictive dialer automates the calling procedure, which makes it easy for your agents to use because all they do is talk to the connected client.
Predictive dialers can also be combined with features such as click-to-call buttons on the user’s end. This way, the available agent will be connected to the client conveniently. Therefore, the predictive dialer improves the process of business and clients connecting with each other.
Conclusion
Once you’ve understood what a predictive dialer is and gone through the benefits listed here, you’ll understand why you should get one for your business. The software offers so many benefits to your organization and clients. The automated calling and predictive dialing ensure that your business is better positioned to reach potential clients.
Typically, the cost of installing the predictive dialer may be expensive upfront. However, in the long run, the benefits will be well worth it. So, think about your business and your goals first before making a decision.