While predictive dialers and progressive dialers are both automatic dialing modes commonly incorporated into contact center solutions, they work differently and serve different scenarios. Below is a quick overview of their unique features.
| Predictive Dialer | Progressive Dialer |
When does it start outbound dialing? | It begins to call contacts even before an agent is free to take a call, based on an aggressive pacing algorithm | It begins to call contacts only when an agent is free to take a call |
How many calls does it place based on outbound agent availability? | It calls many numbers at once for every agent that becomes available | It calls one number for every agent that becomes available |
Does it use an algorithm to work? | Yes | No |
What is it most useful for? | It’s most useful for increasing talk time in campaigns that have large contact lists, balancing efficiency with a good sales process | It’s most useful for improving connection rates and ensuring successful customer interactions in B2B (business to business) campaigns for outbound sales and the like |
For campaigns focused on personalized customer experience, explore the preview dialing mode.
No, predictive dialing software isn’t illegal as long as it adheres to regulatory restrictions established to protect consumers. The most commonly recognized of these are the TCPA and the TPS / CTPS.
The TCPA is a regulatory authority that places limits on the use of automation for contacting United States consumers who have not given their documented consent to receive calls, pre-recorded messages, and faxes from companies. It had set up the National Do-Not-Call list for the country, which allows people to register their numbers so they can minimize receiving solicitation-type phone calls and fax communications.
The TPS / CTPS are registries in the United Kingdom that allow businesses and consumers to avoid receiving unsolicited sales or marketing calls. Organizations that breach the regulations covering the protection of these numbers face fines from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Automatic dialers only become illegal if they don’t take regulations like these into account, and most advanced software for outbound dialing already do.
While it’s easy to conclude that this will cost businesses a lot of money, this is only true if they fail to find the right provider.
The pricier options are often in-house or on-premises. This is when a company chooses to have the additional hardware and software in their offices, often managed by specialized IT personnel. In these situations, the costs can be anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on how large the contact center is—and that’s not even counting maintenance spending and operating costs.
Cloud-based or hosted options have a far more affordable cost than hardware solutions. A predictive dialer plan can go as low as $14 per month for each agent, depending on the provider and specific business needs. More often than not, they include advanced features on top of key features at reasonable prices.
To get real value for money, consider investing in a cloud-based call center solution that goes beyond outbound capabilities and incorporates inbound features like interactive voice response (IVR) and automatic call distribution (ACD).
The best software for predictive dialing would be the one that actually helps your agents engage customers through process automation and truly intelligent outbound dialer functionality. A really good automated dialer seamlessly works with a company’s call center solution to prioritize leads and ultimately boost sales and conversions.
And that’s why it’s always good to consider dialing systems that are already part of your contact center’s outbound phone system. One good example of this would be the 8x8 CCaaS (contact center as a service) solution, which includes predictive, progressive, and preview dialing modes as well as speech recognition and email integration in its omnichannel call center software.
Before you commit to this investment, you need to consider the following questions:
- What’s your standard operating procedure for each interaction? Workflow informs pacing, and the more tasks agents need to perform in between or during calls (research, customer profile updates, etc), the slower the dialing cadence needs to be.
- How big is your team? The smaller your team is, the fewer people you’ll have to pick up automatically connected calls.
- How many contacts need to be called, and for how long? If the list of leads is large, and a campaign will only run for a limited time, you’ll need a dialer that accommodates this.
- What support will you get out of the vendor? Will your provider help set up the system and provide training resources for users?
- How much customization can be applied to this system? Every situation is different, so you may want a solution you can tweak based on individual campaign needs.
As mentioned above, there are many benefits to choosing a cloud-hosted solution—chief among them being value for money. But the bigger advantages come from intelligent solutions that constantly (and often automatically) roll out improvements as soon as they’re available.
An all-in-one cloud contact center solution like the one offered by 8x8 includes call recording, SMS marketing capabilities through APIs, and agent performance monitoring features. Even better? They roll out improvements regularly.
Want to learn more about how 8x8 CCaaS can help manage your outbound campaigns for enhanced contact center performance? Chat with sales or talk to an expert.