What is a hosted predictive dialer?

hosted predictive dialer service provides the client with a high performance and efficient automated dialing solution for telemarketing purposes. The dialer is made available and supported by the service provider and access is delivered to the customer ready to be used online, usually immediately, but could take longer depending on the company. This technology can increase the productivity and efficiency of an entire call center or an individual agent to a great extent. The average talk time of an agent, when manually dialing is 16 minutes per hour, while when this technology is used, it can be increased to 47 minutes per hour. This modern software increases efficiency over 350%. This will result in immense cost savings for any size firm or call center. Taking into account the huge increment in sales and leads (depending on your type of services) due to the increased agent talk time, you can see why auto dialers are gaining so much popularity.

Hosted predictive dialers consist of a more advanced technology than the traditional automatic dialers. In automatic dialers the dialer automatically dials the calls and transfers it to the agents, however it does not screen the call which results in unnecessary wastage of time. This will obviously result in low productivity. A hosted predictive dialer on the other hand, screens the unnecessary calls, and is programmed to predict when the next agent will be available to pick up the next call. It can predict the number of available agents, available lines, average call handling time and various other factors and adjust the flow of the outbound calls accordingly. This measurement delivers a high level of work efficiency to the call centers. This process increases productivity as the agents can spend their time talking to the customers and prospects rather than having to handle the answering machines, busy signals or fax machines.

The information in the contact list along with the telephone numbers is usually stored on the network servers in the call centers. With a hosted predictive dialer the computers of the agents making calls are linked to the network servers which contain the telephone numbers. A software application linked with the predictive dialer is available online to all of the agents. This software application performs the process of dialing for the agents. As soon as the agent receives a call, the software application displays all of the information related to the potential customer on the agent’s computer screen, so the agent can begin the conversation accordingly. A predictive dialer automatically predicts and transfers the call to the available agent on the next available line and skips over the no answers, busy signals, answering machines and the fax machines. Only the calls that are desired are transferred to the agent resulting in much more time spent on the phone talking to real contacts.

Another great benefit of using a predictive dialer system is that it can make your call center agents virtual. In other words, your agents can be the part of call center even if they are not physically present at the call center. The agents can work from home or anywhere they have an internet connection. A hosted predictive dialer can lower overhead as you can save money on having an office. As it is a web based solution, managers have full control to keep track of the agents’ efficiency and productivity.