VoIP Dialer

8x8 Staff

January 27, 2020

In business, the customer is king. A happy customer will stay with you forever, while a disappointed one will not waste any time choosing your competitor over you. According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, customers who had the best past experiences spend 140 percent more, compared to those who had the poorest past experience. But, what makes a customer happy?

Among the many sources of happiness for your customers, how you communicate with them comes first. And, of course, for you to communicate with your customers, you must establish a call center with highly-qualified call agents.

Call centers are the profit-making units in businesses. Without call center agents, your business will not make any revenue. The quality of your call center, and in extension your call center agents, determine the revenue that flows into your business.

Manual Dialer

One of the tools that call center agents need is the dialer to make and receive calls. As you would rightly guess, a dialer comes in handy in establishing connections with prospective clients in an outbound call center.

In other words, dialers are critical tools in call center operations. Studies link the performance, efficiency and ROI of a call center to the dialer-type and its capabilities.

In some businesses, call center agents use manual dialers which enable agents to either dial a number from a pre-loaded list or by typing with a keypad. Agents must then wait for the call to connect. Sometimes the call might miss reaching the answering machine, and instead can either get busy or reach a wrong caller. With the manual dialing, call center agents cannot filter their calls, thus it is the least efficient way of outbound calling.

While most businesses use manual dialers in their call centers due to the low costs needed to set them up, they are not good investments for your business. The average call time per call center agent is too high. Also, the agent idle time is too high. Call center agents spend most of their time in finding, dialing and re-dialing (for busy tones and wrong numbers), and answering machines than actually talking on the call. This may lead to poorly motivated call agents. This, in turn, might affect your business revenue.

Manual dialers are predisposed to unpredictable performance. Since manual dialer-based call centers depend on the agents’ responsibility to get efficient calling performance, there’s vast room for errors and lags. Also, because manual dialer-based call centers are human intensive, they lead to higher cost related to staffing and training.

With the advancement in call center technology, there are now tools that can be used to immensely increase the calling-efficiency and reduce agent idle time. One of these tools is the predictive dialer.

What Is a VoIP Predictive Dialer Software?

Just as the name suggests, a predictive dialer automatically dials numbers by intelligently and efficiently predicting the availability of the agent to pick a call. VoIP dialers make use of predictive dialing technology, which is simply the automation and management of mass outgoing calls.

Some call center solutions such as 8x8 Contact Center come with inbuilt VoIP predictive dialers (and other modes of auto dialing).

How Does a VoIP Predictive Dialer Work?

Based on the average call duration for an agent and a pre-set ratio of the campaign, the predictive dialer mechanically dials multiple numbers at once, even before the agent ends the previous call, from a list of phone numbers. The dialers can also be set to haphazardly dial numbers within a specific area code. With the dialers, all busy signals, answer machines and out-of-service numbers are noted on the list. In addition, the system can recognize when your personnel answers a call, as well as when a call is sent to voice message. When a call connects, it is automatically transferred to the calling center employee or a customer representative of the company who will then complete the call.

Advantages of VoIP Predictive Dialers

Predictive dialing reduces the time call agents take to wait between dialing and connecting to a live customer ready to talk. In addition, the VoIP dialers can intelligently filter busy tones, call waiting, wrong numbers and even answering machines. The most important benefit of a predictive dialer is that it automatically connects an available agent only to a live person.

Boost Business With A VoIP Dialer

Compared to manual dialers, predictive dialers deliver high-class performance. They considerably enhance the number of live connections, as well as time on call. Also, they reduce the waiting time of the agent by dialing the next number even before the previous call has ended. They filter out the non-connected calls. Unlike manual dialers, with predictive dialers, your call center agents are able to make more calls and immensely cut down the idle time of agents. In addition, via predictive dialing, call centers are able to exploit the benefits of time-zone calling.

With the reduction in the time it takes for a call center employee to make a call, your business productivity increase while the labor costs for call centers reduce.

When it comes to VoIP, 8x8 provides a reliable and compliant cloud solution at a demanding level rarely seen by other cloud providers. Don't take your chances with a subpar cloud-based telecom system. Call 1-866-879-8647 or fill out an online form to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.