Predictive Dialing Is Key to Improving Agent Efficiency and Revenue Maximization

Outbound calling can be quite exhausting and overwhelming, especially if it involves manual dialing, wrong numbers, endless dialing, and voicemails.

As an agent, you would waste a lot of time before you get to speak to a live customer.

Imagine if your agents only spoke to people who actually answered the call. Wouldn’t your life be easier?

Absolutely.

This is where predictive dialing comes into play. It works in the background, helping you connect the dots while improving the efficiency of outbound calling.

Here are the possible reasons why you should consider using a predictive dialer:

• It saves time by ensuring a streamlined and scalable outbound calling process
• It reduces manpower by significantly improving the agent’s productivity
• It increases sales and revenue by placing more connected calls in the given time
• It comes with call recording and analytics, allowing you to improve your quality and performance
• It can be integrated with other IT systems, CRM, and IVR, making it easier to reach customers faster

Before we get into how predictive dialers benefit organizations, let us take a moment to define what predictive dialing is and some use cases for better understanding.

What Is Predictive Dialing?

A predictive dialer calls multiple numbers at once. As soon as the customer answers the calls, they are connected to an agent.

Predictive dialers take into account the number of agents available, the ratio of the number of dialed calls to the answered ones, and the average amount of time the agents take to wrap up the call. The predictive dialing algorithm makes use of this information and dials out automatically, maximizing the agent’s talk time and productivity.

The flip side of this is sometimes the customers answer the call even before an agent is available to take the call. This frustrates the customers, and most of them hang up, resulting in call abandonment.

While predictive dialing ensures that agent talk time is maximized, it may come across as an impersonal way to call a customer.

So, you have to be mindful of the flaws associated with predictive dialing before deploying it in your call center.

What Are the Use Cases for Predictive Dialing?

Use Case 1

Let me give you an example.

Recently, we signed up a collections call center as our customer. They had the challenge of increasing their agent’s talk time from 2.5 hours to more than 3 hours.

We looked at their operations and understood they had 30 agents and only 90 channels to call. For every agent, they were making three calls.

We implemented our platform along with predictive dialing capabilities. We understood that they had to make 15 calls to have one connected call. We used 450 channels to keep their 30 agents busy using predictive dialing.

We improved their talk time from 2.5 hours to even 6 hours in some cases. On average, we increased it to 4.5 hours using predictive dialing.

For this use case of collections, predictive dialing might be the choice.

Use Case 2

Let us assume you are launching your broadband connection in a new market. You have bought a huge list to reach, and you have lined up 50 agents to start your outreach program.

The success of your outreach program is completely dependent on the number of people you get to talk to. Here, predictive dialing should be your ideal choice.

It can maximize the number of contacts you make, and there is no need for you to keep the conversation personal with your prospects.

Whenever you need to reach more people and you are selling a commodity, predictive dialing should be your preferred choice.

Use Case 3

You are a survey company that is trying to reach a bunch of people in a particular domain on behalf of a research company. You have already prepared a simple and scripted survey for people to respond to within a minute.

Predictive dialers would be ideal here as they can play a pre-recorded message for context before getting people to respond to the survey.

Use Case 4

You are running a political campaign, and you want to reach as many voters as possible within a given time frame.

A predictive dialer will be the go-to option here, as you only have to ensure compliance with Do-Not-Call (DNC) lists.

Use Case 5

You run a political fundraising campaign, and you are looking at raising small sums from multiple donors.

Predictive dialing would be the appropriate option here. Your success here is directly proportional to the number of people you manage to reach here.

What Are the Advantages of Using Predictive Dialing?

Saves Time with a Streamlined and Scalable Process

Agents spend about 30 to 50% of their time dialing numbers and waiting for the phone to ring or dealing with voicemails and busy tones with manual dialing.

A predictive dialer eliminates all of that and automatically dials multiple numbers and only routes live answers to available agents.

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers in the debt collections space switched from manual dialing to a predictive dialer setup. Within a month, they reported an 80% increase in agent talk time.

Their agents were spending more time negotiating and restructuring payments and less time listening to dial tones.

Reduces Manpower While Boosting Agent Productivity

When agents are spending more time talking than dialing or waiting, you can achieve more with fewer resources. That means you don’t have to staff your team with more resources every time you want to scale up your outreach.

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers in the insurance domain had 15 agents handling renewals and upsells. After implementing a predictive dialer, they could manage the same workload with 10 agents. They redistributed the remaining five agents to focus on new campaigns and warm leads.

Increase Sales and Revenue with More Live Conversations

The more conversations your agents have, the more opportunities you create. Predictive dialers help you connect with more prospects in less time. This turns into additional conversions.

Let me give you an example.

One of our real estate customers was manually making 80 calls a day to schedule site visits for their new properties. They implemented our predictive dialer, and they were able to place 300 calls per day, which allowed them to connect with 4x more live prospects. Within a month, they were able to triple the number of scheduled site visits.

Improves Quality with Call Recording and Analytics

While this is not a direct feature of predictive dialing, most predictive dialers come with built-in call recording and analytics features. This would allow you to review, coach, and improve agent performance over time. 

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers in the accounting space noticed high churn during contract renewals. They analyzed the recorded calls and identified the gaps in how their agents were pitching upgrades. After that, they made some script changes and trained all their agents to pitch better.

This resulted in an 18% retention rate jump.

Easily Integrates with CRMs and IVRs for Seamless Outreach

The biggest advantage of a predictive dialer is that it doesn’t have to work in isolation. It integrates easily with your CRM, ticketing systems, and IVRs, giving agents real-time context before every call.

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers in the B2B SaaS space integrated our predictive dialer with their Salesforce CRM.

They had set some pre-defined rules. For instance, anytime a trial user does not log in for 3 days continuously, they’d be auto-added to a callback list.

The dialer would kick in, connecting agents with these users and helping them get value from the product before the trial ended.

This resulted in a 25% jump in conversions from trial to paid versions of their software.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in sales, collections, support, or renewals; predictive dialer helps you achieve more with less.

Predictive dialers ensure that you spend your time productively talking, listening, selling, and solving instead of dialing and waiting.

So, if your lead generation, lead nurturing or feedback survey process feels clunky, scattered, or time-consuming, you should look at predictive dialing.

After all, every second that you don’t spend talking to your customers and prospects is a second wasted. Take back those seconds with predictive dialers.

Happy dialing!