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Whether it’s for customer loyalty, collection, surveys or telemarketing, dialing technologies are indispensable tools for any contact center. These technologies offer three ways of phone campaign management known as preview, progressive and predictive dialer. As well as a number of options to increase accessibility to called customers and optimize the occupation of agent teams. But the question remains, which one to choose for your contact center? Let’s break them down.
Before describing these 3 modes and presenting their respective advantages. It is important to specify that, whatever dialing technology you choose. The quality of contact files is paramount.
Before choosing between a Predictive, Progressive, or Predictive dialer
It’s very simple, the more information your contact file contains, the more useful and valid data it contains and the more satisfactory your effective contact rate will be. This means that you need to work upstream to consolidate information you have within your CRM, billing system, or other. You must therefore use this information to segment your file according to the specific objectives of your campaign.
It also means that your campaign management system must accept files with as many fields as possible to properly qualify each client ( Demographic, Status, Past complaints etc.) After all, if a contact file contains only names and phone numbers, your agents will have a hard time even with the most perfect call script.
With this condition in mind, here is what you need to know about the different dialing technologies to make an informed choice and reach your contact center goals.
Preview Dialer
When your system detects that one of your agents is available, it presents him with a form containing all the information contained in external databases (CRM or other).
The agent will then read the file in front of his screen, get an overview of the customer’s situation and will be able to get a first idea of what to expect from that specific call. Thus, when he is ready he will be able to trigger the call by clicking on a button on his interface. The Preview Dialer allows you to:
• Give agents the option to reject a recording and move on to the next recording;
• Apply a more restrictive mode where your agent has no choice but to make the call;
• Set an automatic timeout period after which, the registration number is dialed no matter what happens.
It is clear that Preview Dialer offers the greatest working comfort to agents. However, it is not necessarily optimal in terms of productivity. If your agents cannot be sure before initiating calls that a client will pick up and another will actually be available. He may indeed spend a significant part of his time preparing calls that will not succeed.
This is why it is wise to use this dialer for qualitative phone campaigns where clients could be warned in advance that they will be called. This optimal use is one where the starting point is a list of scheduled appointments or reminders are set to guarantee a much higher reachability rate than simple cold calls.
Progressive Dialer
As soon as an agent is available, the Progressive dialer dials the number and pulls a clients’ file on the workstation at the same time. This means that your agent has only a few seconds to read it before the conversation starts. This technology offers a very useful option to maximize the agents’ useful time with answering machine detection.
In this particular case, the clients’ file is not distributed when the number is dialed. The dialer makes a pre-call and if it encounters an answering machine, it switches to the next number. On the other hand, if someone takes the call, the form is automatically forwarded to an agent.
It is true that the progressive dialer is far less comfortable for your agents. After all, having less time to prepare the call can be very effectively compensated by a new generation of conversation guides and arguments. Far from the classical call scripts, these guides can automatically be customized based on clients’ data. Combined with automatic answering machine detection, a progressive dialer eliminates all unnecessary calls that can hamper your call center productivity by ensuring that callers are immediately put through to an agent.
Predictive Dialer
Although almost all contact centers talk about the famous Predictive Dialer. From a technical point of view, it would be more appropriate to describe them as over-numbering call campaigns. After all, predictive refers to the ability of the system to use data from your telephone activity. In particular, the conversation time, the dropout rate, the occupancy rate, etc., in order to calculate the amount of numbers to call during a moment. This will allow predicting which agents will soon be available and also that all the contacts who picked up the phone are actually put in contact with one of your agents in a fraction of a second. However, to achieve this balance between agents and callers, you must take into account calls that are not answered and those that end up on answering machines. Which triggers over-numbering, dialing many more numbers than there are agents.
On the other hand with real-time statistical analysis of activity data, it is now possible to go very far in the adjustment between number of calls and number of agents.
So if you want to take your outbound call campaigns to the next level of optimization, Automated Dialing is a smart way to do it. Predictive Dialer drastically improves the efficiency of your Contact Center.
Conclusion: Give more value to call campaigns
Taking into account the structure of outbound calling platforms and the increasing difficulty to reach targets. As we said at the beginning of this article, any campaign must be based on a detailed analysis of clients. In other words, you must answer these pivotal questions, when can you reach customers? Are they really likely to be interested in the offer? And also on which communication channel should we contact them? Rather than betting on volume, you need to focus on customer experience, and exploit the ability of call engines to integrate this knowledge to define more targeted call and callback strategies. Such capabilities can be found in our omnichannel contact center solution Omni+ from NobelBiz, a powerful omnichannel solution that allows you to seamlessly navigate across all communication channels, no matter where your clients want you to be.
Abdelmounim Benharouga has always had a strong passion for writing and digital marketing. He started as a Digital Content Writer part of marketing department then moved to being Customer Success Manager for the African Region within the Nobelbiz team.
