I am currently using progress dialer from phone burner. What will I gain from switching to Voicent?
We received quite a few related inquiries this week. It seems there are a lot of confusion regarding the various dialer technologies, especially for sales organizations that never used any call center technologies. In this blog article, we address the technical side of this question.
What is a progress dialer?
A progress dialer is simply an automated click-to-call system. It operates a call list, calls a contact from the list; an agent listens to the phone call (including the dialing tone before the call is connected; after the call is answered, the agent talks to the contact or leaves a message for voice mail or answering machine; the agent then hangs up the phone; The system then automatically calls the next contact from the list and so on.
Voicent has progress dialer but it is not that popular among our customers. The following sections explains why.
Why a progress dialer is not efficient?
A progress dialer basically dials a phone number automatically. It offers almost no time savings from manual dialing. It saves some dialing effort, but nothing else. For a typical campaign, the majority of time an agent spent is dealing with machines and wait for the phone calls to be answered. This inefficiency is with manual dialing and progress dialing.
With a predictive dialer, machines can be handled automatically
When a predictive dialer makes a call, it will first detect whether the call is answered by a live human or machine. If it is a machine, it will try to leave a message after the beep automatically or quickly skip the machine. This is nice to have but does not save time if an agent still have to wait during this time.
A predictive dialer normally dials out using multiple lines. So if one line is handling a machine, the other line can be used to talk to a customer. This basically solves the machine answer problem.
With a predictive dialer, agents do not need to listen to the dial tone
Because the dialer knows when a call is answered, there is no need to listen to the dial tone all the time. Actually, it is really a bad idea to listen on multiple lines.
What if multiple lines get live answer?
It happens. In industry jargon, it is called a dropped call. Basically, after a customer says hello, the phone call is cut off / hang up. Dropped call is bad. It is a side effort of a predictive dialer.
To reduce dropped calls, it is normally a good idea to have multiple agents for a campaign. The chances for all agents are busy is less than when the campaign has only one agent. You can also increase the agent to line ratio. For normal operation, a 1:2 ratio is preferred and used.
You can also utilize Voicent Manager Dashboard software, which has an auto pacing algorithm. Once specified, the algorithm will enforce a certain set drop rate.
You can also utilize Voicent’s rollover IVR, which does not drop a call but connects the call to an automated IVR app / auto attendant.
Double or Triple Productivity is Common
When switching from a progress dialer to a predictive dialer, it is common to see your productivity double or triple.