Is Predictive Dialer Better Than Auto Dialer for Your Outreach Efforts?
For business owners, aiming to meet their key business goals, sales reps are a cornerstone of customer engagement. Successful campaigns begin with calls to customers and excellent customer communication. It’s a simple, but winning, combination: a valuable list of leads, well-trained agents, and your business phone.
But to maximize the impact of your telephone campaigns, you need to offer exceptional customer experience and ensure customers trust you. Today’s consumer expects great customer service daily, and they don’t necessarily want to be bombarded with sales calls. It’s vital to ensure both your remote sales team and your in-house staff take a targeted and professional approach. This will make effective cold-calling campaigns far more likely.
It’s also important to give your agents everything they need. In the quest to make better use of your calling list as well as agent talk time, technology and AI, such as predictive dialer and auto dialer, are becoming essential. These technologies can speed up the dialing process and assist your agents in getting those critical messages to your list of contacts.
A predictive or auto dialer can speed up the process of outbound calls, reducing unanswered calls and boosting dial rates, in a way that manual dialing simply cannot match.
While it’s possible to provide sales call scripts for any situation, choosing the right automated dialing software will come down to knowing your unique products and services. But what types of auto dialer software are available and how exactly do they function?
What is a predictive dialer?
There are two types of automated dialing software, predictive and auto. We’ll look at predictive dialers first.
A predictive dialer uses an algorithm (a mathematical equation) to instruct your phone who to call and when. Algorithms allow devices to learn patterns and predict the optimum action to take next. The device can work out stats such as the average call duration and how many calls will be needed before a contact answers.
Predictive dialer also has helpful features such as gauging how long an outbound caller will take to talk to each customer and estimating when an agent will be free to make another call.
Having estimated the call time, the predictive dialer dials the next contact a few seconds before the first call ends. These kinds of features can greatly enhance call center performance.
Predictive dialer takes into account the availability of agents, the pattern of calls, and their duration, and is excellent for larger teams of agents, as well as campaigns where a high call volume is necessary. It’s also great for customer surveys, follow-ups, and customer re-engagement.
What is an autodialer?
Automatic dialing systems or autodialer, whether for lead generation for insurance or customer relationship management, maximizes the workload of the agent per hour, and is a huge advantage.
Auto dialer has excellent features for outbound sales calls. It requires a telephone line, computer software, a human agent, and a voice modem. The voice modem is so that a recorded message can be played via the telephone line.
Some auto-dialers are sophisticated enough to go beyond these basic features and can detect whether a human being answered the call or it went through to voicemail. Auto dialer can also put the person on hold until an agent is available. This automated dialing technology is best suited for small teams of under eight agents.
What is the difference between a predictive dialer and an auto dialer?
The main purpose of predictive dialers and auto-dialers is to enable businesses and organizations to dial as many numbers as possible, as quickly as possible. This can boost connection rates and make launching a successful campaign more likely.
Each business or organization will augment what the predictive and auto dialer software can do, with individualized aids for their agents such as a healthcare call center script in the case of a medical organization or other kinds of prompts or add-ons depending on the sector.
But how does a business choose between the two approaches? What is the difference?
Essentially, predictive dialer is more flexible and self-regulating than auto. In other words, a predictive dialer will dial numbers taking into account agent availability, and it can change and adjust depending on the team’s capacity to answer calls. With auto dialer, the rate is set by the manager, auto dialer isn’t capable of changing this independently.
Both have their advantages, predictive dialer increases the rate of contact by adapting to agent availability, but auto can ensure that a small team is working to a set rate they can handle.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
Pros and Cons
As with choosing any business technology, it’s a case of your individual business needs. A firm might prefer cloud over on-premises or might opt for hybrid integration solutions. It’s the same case with automated dialing.
There are benefits to both systems. The algorithm-based dialing of a predictive dialer can increase the call connection rate. It is intelligent enough to check for available agents and can connect a steady stream of current customers to agents. On the downside, it doesn’t have call waiting as a feature, and agents need to be experienced at answering calls quickly. Algorithms are also not risk-free, they can fail and this can cause major headaches for a campaign.
On the other hand, an autodialer can distribute calls evenly between agents based on average talk time, and the rate the sales manager has set. There is also the advantage of call waiting features and the ability to send messages alerting the team that calls have gone to voicemails. However its drawback is that it can’t check for agent availability or adapt, and although it can detect answering machines, this is not guaranteed to be accurate.
Conclusion
When the automated dialing system you choose is the right fit, the advantages are obvious. From making better use of agent time and increasing the efficiency of agents, to increasing calls per day, contact rates, and reducing abandoned calls.
Predictive or auto dialer systems can give a huge lift to your sales campaign. You must also know your consumer base well, and choose sales teams and targets that best match your business and its goals.
