How to Improve Your Dialers

Think if you are in the B2B, B2C or telesales business then certainly are familiar with automatic dialers or other telemarketing dialers and the associated autodialed software. For those who aren't familiar, automatic dialers are either hardware or software that will call a preset list of numbers, or numbers at random, and transfer any live callers to available agents. The software can distinguish between an actual human answering or fax and answering machines. The problem is that the software cannot always know when agents will be free which results in calls that are dropped because they can't be answered. An improvement on the ordinary dialer is the predictive dialer.

Predictive dialers solve the problems of the standard automatic dialer. Instead of a "shotgun" approach, calling numbers, transferring live calls and dropping those which don't have enough agents, the predictive dialer tries to predict how many agents will be free to handle calls. The dialer takes into account the current agents sitting idle, and the number of calls that go through. It can log how many fax or answering machines pick up, how many calls are being answered and how many numbers are disconnected. It derives a percentage from this data, and compares it against how many agents are idle at a given time, and how long each call is taking. It then calls only as many numbers as is needed. Because it can predict how many agents will be ready to receive calls at any give time it can make calls even if all agents are busy, based on the amount of agents likely to be idle when the call goes through.