Auto Dialers- What is the difference between Predictive, Preview, Progressive and Power Dialers?

In a contact center, there are various critical functions playing their unique roles to optimize a business. Dialers play one such important role in the process. A business can benefit greatly with the use of a suitable dialer for its calling campaign given the cost savings from productivity increases alone.

The key is to determine which auto-dialer is the best option for your business, campaign or client’s needs. Driven with intelligence and advanced technology, Aavaz possesses a clear understanding of the growing needs of businesses. Here are some of the defining features of auto-dialers and how you might benefit from them:

Predictive Dialer

What is a Predictive Dialer?
Predictive dialers use complex mathematical algorithms to determine precisely when to place calls, predicting completion of current calls and dialing the next before the agents are finished. With multiple dialer options, agents spend most of their time within calls rather than making them- increasing agent efficiency.

Who should use Predictive Dialers?
Predictive dialers are found to be very effective for large call centers and result, on an average, in better talk time per hour for the agents.

Who should not use Predictive Dialers?
We don’t recommend Predictive Dialers for small businesses who have calling campaigns with an agent pool under 15 people. Think of predictive as a large set of “intelligent” marbles that are thrown on the calling hemisphere and are collecting calls to immediately serve to an agent who is wrapping up their prior call. If you only have 15 or less agents- the predictive dialer will not work as efficiently because there isn’t a large enough group of calls for it to masterfully queue calls for 100’s of agents- like it’s supposed to.
In addition, we highly recommend checking the regulations from your specific country before you begin your purchasing process. For example- Ofcom of the United Kingdom, DNC of the United States of America etc.

Power Dialer

What is a Power Dialer?
While Aavaz does not offer this feature, a power dialer dials a list of numbers, one number instantly after the other. If a number is busy, disconnected, or there’s no answer, the dialer can immediately move to the next. This saves valuable time for agents.
Who should use Power Dialers?
Companies who are entering into outbound for the first time and do not have the capital to invest in a predictive dialing solution and/or do not want to go down the route of a hosted dialer
Who should not use Power Dialers?
Power dialing should not be used by someone who wants to run an event based campaign or for campaigns that require call-backs for nurturing leads. For eg: if you want to call 100 people for your event- out of the 100 people, you didn’t get through 10 people on the first time of calling. In this situation, a Power dialer will remove these 10 people from the list causing you to lose valuable information and leads and in the case of events- not allowing you to actually confirm attendance.

Preview Dialer

What is a Preview Dialer?
In this dialer, the system is able to provide agents with information about the callers before a call is being made for the campaign. Things like call history, a website address, notes etc helps an agent to familiarize themselves with the customer’s history before they speak with them within a pre-set amount of time. An agent can be given 30 seconds to review the prospects information before the system starts dialing them automatically.

Who should use Preview Dialer?

This kind of dialer is essential in businesses focused in a dedicated customer relationship management and on agent efficiency.

Who should not use Preview Dialer?

Campaigns who need to make priority calls from a list will not benefit from this dialer. For example, an eCommerce company wanting to target a large segment of people with the same need (ie- buying shoes) will not benefit from preview dialing because their need is one and the same. There is little left to prioritize in that particular scenario.

Progressive Dialer

What is a Progressive Dialer?

At Aavaz, we do not support progressive dialers. What progressive dialers simply do, is auto-dialing numbers one after the other, so that an agent does not have to manually dial the numbers. This will improve contact rates for your campaign tremendously. Predictive dialing is close to progressive dialing but they are not at all the same.

Who should use Progressive Dialer?

On completing the previous call, the system automatically dials the next number on the list. This removes the wait time between calls. This is ideal where the calls are very similar in nature and increases your campaign productivity significantly. Business to business sales campaigns would benefit significantly from using Progressive dialer.
Who should not use Progressive Dialer?
Sales and debt collection campaigns will not be able to benefit from the dialer due to its low talk time per hour rate.
An agent using Progressive Dialer has to manually distinguish if the call is answered by an answering machine or a live contact, this is not suitable for campaigns requiring high contact rates from agents.
We hope we’ve cleared some confusion for you. Any business equipped with these dialers can choose the right dialer for their needs and be well on the path to successful campaigning.