Predictive Dialers vs Progressive Dialers: What’s the Difference?

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In a call center environment the outbound activities are very important to achieve a firm customer base and to make the most out of the available resources, be it human or technical. Because every outbound call made by the dialer comes with the possibility of building a meaningful customer-agent connection.

Apart from this, in the customer support environment, the rate of connection with the customers depends on the timing of the call made because a customer may only like attending a business call until he finds some worth in it.

In the call center environment, there are various kinds of dialers, manual, automatic, preview, progressive and predictive. In this way, every type or scale of business has a dialer that fits in perfectly for its needs.

Here we will see a comparison between progressive and predictive dialers.

Hosted Dialer

Every call center environment has to maintain an infrastructure for outbound calls. Wherein agents make an approach to the customers to make a sale or a pitch for products or services. This decides the overall success in making a fruitful connection with the customers.

And to make this happen, it is necessary to understand that the ideas related to the outbound activities should be well thought over and based on data and statistics. Because then positive results show up. A dialer brings in many possibilities towards a better customer base with a strategy of bringing a complete business success.

There are various type of outbound dialing options that help the call centers to achieve the needed target for the customer connection. Here we will mainly talk about progressive and predictive dialing because they are widely used in the call center environment.

Progressive Dialing

Progressive dialing is a way of outbound solution in which the dialer automatically dials a number from the saved call list of the customers. The idea of a progressive dialer is it dials the numbers only when an agent is available.

A progressive dialer facilitates the interactions between an agent and customers with lesser time wastage. A progressive dialer also ensures that the idle time of the caller is minimum. Progressive dialer also avoids the busy signals, answering machines, disconnected numbers or IVRs.

Progressive dialers increase the efficiency by reducing manual time and effort on dialing, which meaning spending more time on talking to the live prospects. Various dialing options help in call connection with a much better productivity.

Progressive dialers dial the calls only after considering the availability of the agents, however, predictive dialing has more of a data based dialing technique. Let’s look at predictive dialing in comparison to progressive dialing.

Predictive Dialing

The idea of predictive dialing uses various algorithm to predict the improved connectivity. Number of calls dialed by the Predictive dialer in a by time duration considers various factors, such as – most available time of the customer, call handling time of an agent, wrong number/machine answers, etc.

The customer data is fed into the predictive dialer and it does the needed deductions to choose the best time to call the customers.

This automatic dialing solution has a better dialing frequency because a predictive dialer first dials the number and then connects to the next available agent. Predictive dialing ensures that the number of connection with the customers should be maximum possible with the customer data at hand.

Predictive dialing takes care of the customers all over the world and it makes it more likely for the customers to take the calls because of the appropriate call timings.

Another factor that helps predictive dialing is the security it carries because it also gets updated on its own. And all these benefits come in a very economic cost.

Picking A Dialer

Any dialing solution can work well for you provided you understand the scale of your business and the CRM integration and other attributes make it worthwhile to make it more result oriented for the outbound activities to work for your business. So depending on the scale of business and its needs, a dialer can be chosen.

It is always advisable to understand the scale and scheme of your business first and then go for a particular dialer because this makes the idea of an outbound solution more productive for the sake of a business’s growth.

Choosing a dialer comprises many touchpoints, as we mentioned apart from the scale of your business, number of customer connection is the ulterior motto of your outbound calls. Because outbound calls help in customer connection, retention and maintaining relationship to take it to completely new level.

Progressive and predictive dialers come with their own attributes that work differently in the specific business scenarios. So choose wisely when it comes to dialers. Afterall every connected outbound call can lead your business to a long-lasting loyal customer and a steady business growth.