For people who never work in a call center before, a predictive dialer is sometimes a little confusing. How does it work and why it is so much better than click to call?
First, let’s take a look at a typical phone call. When you place a call, either manually dialed or click-to-call is used, your phone service will try to connect the call. Normally, it takes a few rings for someone or a machine to answer the call. On average, it probably takes about 25 seconds just to get the call answered. If you want to leave a message on the machine or voice mail, then you have to listen for the prompt and wait for the beep (probably another 10 second). For calls answered by human, depending on your campaign, the talk time may also be pretty short for most conversations.
As you can see, if you dials down a list, most of the time are wasted. If you are a owner of a business, you are basically paying your employees to do an inefficient task.
How does a predictive dialer work?
A predictive dialer automatically dials a call list. When a call is answered by machine, it either skips it or leave a message automatically; when a call is answered by a live human, the call is connect to an agent right away. Though this automated dialing alone is an improvement, however, it does not offer too much improvement for efficiency.
The main advantage of a predictive dialer is that it utilizes multiple lines to call out, so one line is dealing with an answering machine (no human intervention is needed), the other line is connected to a live human. By making calls in parallel automatically, a predictive dialer can easily double or triple your productivity.
How does agent talk to customers?
Agent needs to download a program called Voicent Agent Dashboard, which is basically a soft phone on your computer. A computer headset is need to talk to customers. We recommend a noise canceling USB based headset.
When a call is answered by a live human, the agent will hear a short beep. That means he can start talking. When the call is finished, he simply releases the call. The dialer knows the agent is available again so it will try to make more calls. Comparing with a click to call campaign, a predictive dialer campaign is passive for an agent. He simply sits there, wait for the connection, and then talk. Everything else is handled by the dialer automatically.
In addition to be a soft phone, Voicent Agent Dashboard is also the interface to the built-in CRM. While talking to customers, the agent can take notes, view the engagement history, and update any customer info.