5 stress-free ways predictive dialers can improve your outbound results

You probably already know the main purpose of predictive dialers: they ring more people than there are agents available, distributing calls in a way that your team can have back-to-back conversations with contacts. This drastically improves talk time in outbound campaigns, yet many call centers are reluctant to use predictive dialing mode. A common fear is that the system might initiate too many calls, overwhelming agents and bothering contacts with silent calls.

Luckily, there are many settings that help you use this tool according to your contact center’s capacity. You can set up limits, finetune settings and even choose your most ideal dialing strategy, keeping your outbound efforts safe and controlled. In this blog post, you’ll learn a few ways predictive dialers can increase your contact center’s productivity without creating unnecessary chaos for anyone.

1. Minimize risks

VCC Live’s predictive dialer limits the number of abandoned calls to just one: if, for any reason, a person picks up without an agent on the other side of the line, their number gets added to a separate list. This helps agents follow up with them using other channels (such as SMS or email) while protecting contacts from receiving multiple silent calls within a campaign.

To be extra safe, the formula this dialer is based on recalculates itself multiple times per second to always adjust to the campaign’s progress and thus improve results minimizing risks at the same time.

One other safety measure is how the system adjusts ringing time automatically for best results which can also have an impact on dropped call ratio and other campaign performance metrics.

This is especially important given the fact that multiple countries penalize too many dropped calls.

2. Monitor the number of agents

Another great way to avoid chaos while using a predictive dialer is to determine the minimum number of agents you need. In most campaigns, at least five team members are recommended.
If the number of available agents drops below the threshold you set up (for example, due to a sudden, unexpected break or a power outage), the system will immediately switch from predictive to power dialer. This way, your remaining agents won’t be overwhelmed by more calls than they can possibly handle.

When more agents log back in, the system runs a quick analysis in predictive static mode first, then seamlessly returns to predictive dialing.

3. Set your dialer right: Choose from templates or have your settings finetuned

As you probably know, predictive dialers work best with campaigns that have large databases and fairly similar estimated call lengths. There are plenty of settings related to this that specifically match even the most intricate details of your project and the database – they all may have varying effects on the campaign’s results.

There are a few options to go about this. First of all, VCC Live provides a selection of templates tailored to some common campaign types, such as:

• consistently brief calls (in telesales projects, for instance),
• mostly brief and occasionally long calls (for sales calls that can turn into a consultative discussion),
• brief and long calls that occur equally (such as over-the-phone surveys), or
• default settings for standard operation.

If none of these fully match your needs, the customer service team at VCC Live can help you fine tune predictive dialing so that the settings are perfectly adjusted.

4. Define your most ideal dialing strategy

When you work with a large database, defining which contacts your auto dialer should ring first may help.

For example, you can follow an importance strategy, putting people with certain attributes at the top of the list. This can come in handy when you run a B2B business that prefers to work with larger companies: if you have access to this information (for example, by including a question about headcount on your contact form), you can easily set up an order and call your biggest (potential) customer first within a campaign.

In other cases, a sequential strategy might be the best. Imagine a B2C campaign with a database that has contacts from all age groups. Knowing that the main audience consists of middle-aged individuals, you might want to create a dialing sequence that rings this age group first, then older generations, then goes back to calling middle-aged folks and then younger contacts, repeating this sequence until the end of the campaign. This will keep your agents motivated, as they’ll potentially make successful calls throughout the day instead of having a positive streak once and then lots of rejections for hours.

5. Combine it with AMD

You can further optimize your outbound campaigns by using answering machine detection along with your predictive dialer. This way, the system will automatically skip voicemail messages, ensuring that your agents spend as much time talking to real people as possible.

Additionally, AMD handles calls that go to voicemail based on the process of your choice: for example, you can decide to play a pre-recorded message for these contacts, send them a follow-up SMS, or add them to your callback list.

VCC Live’s predictive dialer in action

More about useful contact center software features

If you found this post interesting, check out these resources as well:

• Some features you may not be using in your call center scripting tool yet
• AI-powered contact center capabilities to consider in 2024
• Must-have features for a successful remote contact center