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What Are Hosted Predictive Dialer Services

A hosted predictive dialer service provides the user with a high performance automated predictive dialer on a monthly rental basis. The dialler is made ready for use, supported and secured by the service provider and then delivered to the user ready for use within a few hours. A hosted predictive dialer can significantly increase the productivity of outbound contact centre staff. The average actual agent ‘talk time’ when manually dialling is 12 minutes per hour, using a predictive dialer this increases to 44 minutes. This represents an increase in efficiency of over 300%. This equates to massive cost savings for any size outbound call centre and when you take into account an anticipated tripling of sales / leads / debt recovery depending on your type of business due to the increased agent talk time you can see why predictive dialer’s are becoming so popular.

A hosted predictive dialler service pays for itself very quickly, typically within the first month. Unlike traditional premises based diallers where significant capital expenditure was required, there is generally only a small one off set up fee and then a cost effective monthly service fee with no costly per agent software licenses required with most providers. The only other costs to consider are the actual call charges themselves which can be extremely competitive. In addition you will find some providers providing all training and unlimited telephone technical support as part of a predictive dialler package.

Other considerations to bear in mind are whether providers can provide a dedicated server, as this can provide additional security for your data, as you will not need to share a server with other clients. This can be an absolutely essential requirement when working with many financial institutions.

There are a number of other reasons why organisations could want to benefit from a hosted predictive dialer service. In addition to operating in manual (also known as preview), broadcast, ratio and predictive outbound also consider the need for full inbound and blended capabilities so agents are also able to deal with inbound enquiries at the same time.

Skills based routing, ACD, queuing and IVR can come as standard with some services along with integrated call recording if required. In addition the potential to run multiple campaigns simultaneously in different dialling modes is possible as a feature. An example of this could be if you want to call your top customers in preview mode to ensure your agent has read the latest notes whilst you are running a cold calling campaign in predictive dialer mode.

With services being entirely web based it opens up the possibility of virtual contact centre’s and agent home working. Agents don’t have to be office based, and can operate from anywhere with a reasonable internet connection. Supervisors can keep a close eye on agent activity through a live web based wall board and can even listen into and barge calls regardless of the agents location.

With the latest set us providing comprehensive historical reporting, supervisors can view in detail not only the degree of success of particular campaigns but also the performance of individuals, and allows them to understand where they may require further training.

For those organisations either still sceptical of Voice over IP or who are tied into long term ISDN contracts it is possible nowadays for services to integrate seamlessly with existing PBX / ACD. CRM applications can often be integrated with to provide screen popping of callee’s details for both in and outbound calls and in some cases can synchronise the diallers database with that of the CRM’s to negate the need for the already simple data uploading process.

Call disposition (outcome) codes are easily customisable to suit most business and most services allow for data in a number of formats to be quickly and efficiently uploaded as well as call reports exported. Do check however, that any service you consider can be forced to be fully OFCOM compliant so it is suitable whether you are calling business’s or residential numbers.

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