Call Center 101.com

About Predictive Dialers

A predictive dialer is piece of hardware or software in a call center that automatically dials a large number of phone numbers that are stored in a contact database. Specifically, predictive dialers are used in an outbound call center or telemarketing operation.

Predictive dialers can dramatically increase telemarketer productivity and efficiency in the call center by handling disconnected phone numbers, unanswered numbers, busy signals and answering machines.

In addition, predictive dialers monitor the length of each live call by each agent, and calculates the average time spent per call, or average call length. In this way, call center efficiency goes up dramatically as the predictive dialer can dial a number and hand it off to an agent as soon as the previous call has ended. As such, company representatives spend less time dialing numbers and more time talking to prospective customers.

Note: Predictive dialers should not be confused with autodialers, which are used to send prerecorded messages to contacts and then automatically transfer the call to a live agent depending on the menu option selected on the message by a person.

More info on predictive dialers