Everything You Need to Know About Auto-Dialers

How do you ensure the success of your outbound call centers?

It is by the number of people you reach and convert in the fastest possible time.

It doesn’t matter whether you are in lead generation, debt collection, or conducting research and surveys; auto-dialers would help you connect with the right people faster and smarter.

If your volume of calls is high, you should definitely consider using auto-dialers. It would help you save time, boost productivity, and improve ROI significantly.

What Is an Auto-Dialer?

A hardware or software program that automatically calls numbers from a pre-compiled list is called an auto-dialer. After a call is answered, it can either play a recorded message, connect to a live agent, or use an IVR system to communicate with the recipient.

By doing away with the need to dial numbers manually, auto-dialers increase agent conversation time and decrease idle time. They are extensively utilized across industries and are a fundamental part of outbound call centers.

How Does an Autodialer Work?

Let me start with a few likely scenarios.

You receive a call, and you answer it. Immediately, it plays an automated message stating that you are eligible for a premium credit card from a particular bank, and if you are interested, you should press ‘1.’

You receive a call, and you answer it. It plays a message stating that your request has moved from waitlisted to confirmed status for a ticketed music show. You can get the details of the ticket by pressing ‘1.’

You receive a call, and you answer it. It immediately connects to a live agent who starts to engage you.

Here is the typical flow of an autodialer.

Besides, you can integrate your auto dialers with CRMs. You can allow scripting, support call recording, and offer detailed analytics.

Auto Dialer vs. Manual Dialer

Understanding the difference between manual dialing and auto dialing is key to choosing the right outbound strategy for your business.

Let us look at manual dialing.

This is the traditional route that call centers follow. Here, the agents physically dial numbers from a list or CRM. They wait through ringing tones and voicemails. They log call outcomes manually or via semi-automated systems. Missed calls, misdials, and wrong numbers are common.

The entire process is slow, labor-intensive, and prone to human error.

For instance, if you are a sales representative who is tasked with reaching 100 leads in a day. With manual dialing, you would probably end up having 20 to 30 meaningful conversations in a day. The rest of the time will be spent waiting and navigating the phone systems.

Let us look at auto-dialing.

It automates everything from dialing to call routing and logging. It allows only answered calls to reach agents, and you don’t have to spend time navigating voicemails, busy tones, and disconnected numbers.

Types of auto-dialers include:

• Preview dialers: Agents see the contact information before the call and can choose when to dial.
• Progressive dialers: Automatically dial the next number only when the agent is available.
• Predictive dialers: Use algorithms to dial multiple numbers ahead of time and assign connected calls to available agents.

With auto-dialers, the same sales representative can now reach 200 to 300 leads in a day, with 60 to 90 meaningful conversations. What we are looking at is a 3x more productivity with auto-dialers.

What Are the Use Cases for Auto Dialers?

Let us look at use cases across industries that are ideal for auto dialers. Within that, let us also look at what kind of auto-dialers are appropriate for the use cases.

Call Volume

You are a small business, and you participated in a trade event. You had about 200 visitors to your booth.

Now, you want to follow up with them. How do you go about doing it?

Preview of progressive dialers would be the ideal option here. You are looking at a low volume of 200 visitors, and with preview and progressive options, you can have meaningful conversations.

Let us assume that you have bought a huge database of customers to promote your mobile phone plans. What do you use?

Here, you should opt for predictive dialers. Here, you need to reach a larger set of people, and the nature of the offering is simple to explain.

Call Complexity

Do you run a financial advisory firm where you deal with high-networth individuals? Do you only talk to people who have engaged with your thought leadership sessions or website or those who have expressed some form of interest?

In this case, you would be better off using preview or progressive dialers. With these, you can have detailed discussions on investment options per the customer’s needs and risk appetite.

Let us look at a different scenario now.

You are a market research company, and you want to run a survey with a large set of people. You have already prepared the survey questions for people to respond to within a minute.

Here, your choice should be to go with predictive dialers. You can play a pre-recorded message for context before getting people to respond to the survey.

CRM Use Case

You run a premium real estate organization. You’re dependent on your past clients for repeat business and references.

How do you engage with them?

I would suggest that you go with preview dialing here. Your agents can pull all the necessary information about the clients before starting to engage with them. This would be more personalized and can result in a relationship.

You are a SaaS company, and you have 100s of thousands of customers. You have to manage your renewals properly. While you communicated about renewals through multiple channels, you also want to reach them on the phone.

How do you go about this?

You should go with predictive dialing. You can reach more subscribers in less time and possibly throw in additional offers as a part of the renewal discussions.

How Do Auto-Dialers Help Boost Call Center Efficiency?

Reduce Agent Idle Time

One of our customers in the debt collection space was able to increase the agent live calls from 20 to 55 per day.

This was achieved just by eliminating wait times and dropped dials.

Increase Agent Talk Time

The same customer in the debt collection space increased their agent talk times from 2 hours to 4.5 and, in some cases, up to 6 hours using our auto dialers.

They spent more time talking and they were able to achieve up to 40 minutes of talk time per hour.

Real-Time Campaigns Adjustments

One of the market research agencies that use our auto-dialers tracked their progress live with our dashboards and analytics.

They understood that the response rates were higher between 4 and 7 pm. So, they tweaked their campaign to dial out more numbers during this time and by increasing the availability of agents during this time.

This resulted in a whopping 30% increase in survey responses.

Intelligent Routing

A platform like ClearTouch not only connects the calls but also routes the calls to the right agents with the right skills to address the customer’s needs.

Besides, it also routes calls based on location. For instance, a caller from Tamilnadu will be routed to a Tamil-speaking agent.

Ensure Compliance

ClearTouch’s auto-dialers are built with guardrails. It incorporates Do Not Call (DNC) list checks, time-zone-aware dialing, consent management, and call recordings.

This ensures compliance with regulations like GDPR, TCPA, FDCPA, and local telecom regulations.

Efficient Integrations

Auto dialers can plug into CRMs, ticketing systems, and lead databases to auto-update records, trigger workflows, and even schedule callbacks based on call outcomes.

We integrated our auto dialer with Salesforce for one of our insurance customers. Whenever a customer requests a policy change, it updates the CRM, triggers a follow-up call, and sends the agent a reminder without any manual intervention.

A good agent can talk. A platform with auto dialer lets your good agents speak more to the right people, with the right context, and at the right time.

Auto dialers are not just about speed; they’re intelligent orchestration tools that empower your agents.

They empower your agents to do more with less!