How Does a Cloud Hosted Predictive Dialer Work?

We’ve learned all about predictive dialers and why they are an essential aspect for your business in the previous blog. Now let’s look at the “HOW” associated with predictive dialers. Let’s see how predictive dialers work and what is the process that they follow.

Dialers are becoming increasingly popular these days, and the growing hype of customer service excellence also plays a significant role in the ever-increasing industry of call centers and the need for advanced communication technologies.

The significance of predictive analysis is also growing day by day to anticipate a future event with the help of data analytics.

In the communications industry as well, predicting and anticipating a customer or an agent time can help in utilizing the available resources.

Basic Working of The Predictive Dialer:

A predictive dialer uses specific algorithms to determine when the agent will be next available to take the incoming call.

All the prospective leads for outbound dialing are uploaded on the hosted predictive dialer installed on a server. The agents can log in from anywhere to access the same server. A predictive dialer starts making outbound calls to prospects as the outbound campaign has been customized.

The dialer manages all the outgoing calls here. It also figures out when and whom to call. It is known as a predictive dialer because it predicts the availability of agents as per their respective average handling times. The predictive dialer is also capable of filtering out the busy calls, unanswered calls, answering machines, and it only puts through the live calls to the agents. This feature ensures that the call center gains maximum profits from the number of agents available.

Predictive dialers display the caller information only when the call is connected to the agent. It has scope for customization and personalization but not as much as a preview dialer does. The call ratio of a predictive dialer can be changed by the manager as per the demand or according to the number of agents logged in at a particular time.

The figure above shows a typical example of how all the components associated with predictive dialing are connected.

The Dialer Component:

The predictive dialer predicts or anticipates when the agent will be over with the call and ready to take the next call. If we talk in technical terms, it examines the Average Handling Time (AHT) of the agent and adjusts the dialing ratio accordingly. This analysis and adjustment ensure that the agent gets to answer another call as soon as he/she is done with the ongoing call.

The predictive dialer is also capable of filtering out the bad numbers or the numbers that result in no answer, busy tone, answering machine, and more. These numbers are filtered out by the predictive dialer, and only the calls that get answered by a live person are connected to the agent.

The figure below shows how a predictive dialer filters out bad calls and connects the right calls to the agents.

Right Call To The Right Agent:

Predictive dialers enhance the productivity of the agents by only connecting them to answered calls and saving them from wasting their time in listening to busy tones, answering machines, and more. This feature helps managers extract the maximum benefit from the available resources.

The dialer keeps track of all the agents and assigns the call to the agent that has waited for the maximum or whose wait time is more than the others. Ringing the call to the agent who has waited for the maximum is one way of routing calls. There are also several other routing techniques such as round-robin, where the calls are distributed to every agent equally following a fixed one after the other pattern and ring all in which the answered call is ringed to all the agent and the agent that first picks up the call gets to communicate with the caller.

The agents get the caller information only when the call is connected to the and a live person is answering on the other side.

Crucial Factors For Predictive Analysis:

Many factors are continuously and regularly updated while using the predictive dialer. These factors are analyzed and help with the smooth functioning of the dialer going forward. Let’s take a look at these factors:

• The average number of rings or the average time before the customer picks up the call.
• The percentage of calls that are answered or the success ratio of the calls dialed.
• The average time that agents are taking to wrap up the call. Tracking the average handling time (AHT) of the agents helps the dialer to set a dialing ratio accordingly and also stay in lines according to the TCPA compliance.
• The number of agents currently logged in or currently active to take the calls. The dialing ratio of the dialer can be adjusted according to the number of agents logged in or the demand of the business.
• The dialer also tracks the abandoned calls or the abandonment rate. An abandoned call is a call that gets disconnected before being connected to the active agent.

Reduced waiting time for the prospects is crucial as it keeps the call abandonment rate to a minimum and in the acceptable range. It is also essential that the agents have a minimum waiting time to reduce inefficiency and gain maximum profit from the resources available.

Predictive dialers are an excellent asset when you want to drive your sales and call the maximum number of prospects in a limited time as they help the agents by increasing their talk time many folds.

Hosted Predictive Dialers:

We have talked about predictive dialers in detail, but now let’s focus on the cloud part of the dialer. Hosting a predictive dialer makes it even more efficient than it already is as it increases scalability, efficiency and helps overcome geographic boundaries.

The functioning of the predictive dialer remains the same, even in a hosted environment. The difference only lies in the fact that a hosted environment can provide more physical freedom and refrain the call center from putting in extra costs in running their call center. It also makes the user independent from the system limitations, so all you need is a good internet connection, a headset, and a computer, hosted dialers work perfectly fine.

A hosted dialer can connect to agents from anywhere around the world, giving rise to the concept of remote agents. It also ensures that the call center does not spend any extra costs on hardware and space requirements. A hosted dialer can also be helpful for call centers that have a possibility of upscaling and downscaling frequently.

In the figure above, agents from different regions are connected to the hosted predictive dialer and can work remotely and effectively without having to adhere to the physical boundaries.

Apart from supporting the remote agents, a hosted dialer has other benefits too it also saves costs, secures your data, unifies and streamline your call center operations and helps you focus on core business aspects without worrying about the outbound calling needs of your call center.

Next Up!

Next up in this blog series is how predictive dialers can help with your sales acceleration. Subscribe to our blog and stay updated.