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18 Important Features of Predictive Dialer Helpful to Any Business

 

Are you a business owner or the head of a sales team? Do you want to dial as many leads as possible at lightning speed? If your answers were yes, the best solution is a predictive dialer.

With the use of predictive dialers, you can improve your dialing rates by 500% as they can handle a huge amount of leads efficiently and effectively at once. Worry- and hassle-free predictive dialing manages the dialing speed for you and provides you more time to work on other tasks.

When you start to adapt predictive dialers and other functions like ringless voicemail, you’ll be able to reduce your sales representatives’ downtime. Your company may even maximize the volume of calls made to each house, which increases the number of the leads passed to your sales team.

In addition to that, predictive dialers may help you dial smarter. While power dialers provide you more control by enabling you to choose the speed, predictive dialers make the most logical decision for agents. If you’re trying to reach many prospects in a short period of time, you can never go wrong with predictive dialers.

 

Types of Predictive Dialers

At present, there are numerous predictive dialers you can choose for your business. Generally, there are two types of predictive dialers and these include:

• Soft Dialers – Also known as software-only dialers, they’re often inexpensive because they don’t require costly components, but some quality features like answering machine detection may suffer. Usually, these dialers are connected to existing systems. In a lot of cases, specialized call classification cards are used to do call progress analysis.
• Hard Dialers – Referred to as hardware dialers, this kind of predictive dialer dedicates telephony switch and answering machine detection to do call progress analysis. More often than not, the switch has two primary types of connections: external audio and agent audio.

Agent audio connections are simple telephony spans that are connected directly to another existing system like VoIP. Once an agent logs in for the day, hard dialers will place a call from the switch to the phone on the desk of the sales rep. Open phone calls between agents and the switch of the dialer will be then kept open for the session’s duration.

On the other hand, external audio connection is the connections that will be used for making outbound phone calls. When outbound calls are made and answered, calls are joined to an open agent audio connection of agents immediately.

 

What Predictive Dialers Can Do for You

Now that you know the types of available predictive dialers on the market, it’s time to know the features of these dialers. Below are some of the important features of predictive dialers helpful to any business, depending on your needs or preferences:

1.  Analytics and Reports

As a business owner, you must monitor the performance of agents in frequent intervals because it helps determine where agents lack to deliver good customer service. Monitoring the performance of your agents regularly may help improve your company’s calling operations. This is the reason why you need to choose a predictive dialer that offers analytics and reports.

With the detailed reports provided by predictive dialers, these come in handy for supervisors since reports can include call details and real-time tracking information.

2.  Pacing Ratio

One of the primary functions of predictive dialers is to get the best out of your company’s sales representatives or agents. Therefore, predictive dialers dial several numbers automatically for an agent. It happens when agents are on call or about to finish a call and ensures that the agents won’t have to wait for a long period of time before connecting to another prospective client.

A good predictive dialer must have a flexible pacing ratio, which enables businesses to change it, increase sales, and improve the performance of the agents.

3.  CRM Integration

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is basically an approach used to manage business interactions with potential and current customers. It uses different data insights to analyze customer history with businesses to improve relationships and increased sales.

One of the key features that predictive dialers must have is CRM integration as it helps improve business productivity to a greater extent. Customer connections can easily be made more quickly and more frequently when predictive dialers are backed up by customer data. CRM integration decreases agents’ average call handling time as it offers easy access to customer data and more information.

With CRM integration features, agents can easily focus on high priority tasks instead of wasting time on synchronizing data and transferring files through various devices and platforms.

4.  Call Conferencing

Predictive dialers enable agents to get connected to ongoing calls as a third party. This feature is known as call conferencing, which requires no additional charge.

When conferencing calls, agents will need to make a call to the customer. After it’s connected, dialers dial the number to the agents you like to connect to. When the second person gets the call, you connect both calls at the same time just by pressing the button for call conferencing.

5.  Custom Disposition

Another important feature of predictive dialers helpful to businesses is custom disposition. Basically, a disposition is an action taken by agents after the call wherein they fill out several entries related to call conversations.

It can take a lot of time for agents to fill out the information related to calls manually, but with predictive dialers, that time is drastically cut. Predictive dialers offer options to set custom dispositions, which can be helpful in reducing the after-call work of the agents.

When calls end, agents choose the most appropriate status in the dialers. Such status codes are essential to keep track of the call histories or what occurred in the calls. In addition, such dispositions are beneficial for supervisors when filtering out leads. Predictive dialers provide the functionality to set any custom disposition status for every campaign.

6.  Call Monitoring

When looking for predictive dialers, one of the essential features to check is a call monitoring function. It allows businesses to monitor the number of calls, which helps determine the number of the available agents and those who talk to prospective clients.

Call monitoring feature also enables you to preview the quality of the outgoing calls. This process happens in between calls. You may also get in on calls without the clients knowing through whispering and barging features. Such features make it easy for the agents to deal with their clients more efficiently and effectively.

7.  Voicemail Message Drop

Voicemail message drop enables you to drop pre-recorded messages to somebody’s number. Most advanced predictive dialers can detect voice messages automatically and when calls are hung up on answering machines, the system will drop a pre-recorded voice message.

Moreover, businesses may optimize their marketing campaigns by sending customized or exclusive promotional voicemails to their target clients. This feature may also help increase customer outreach and can be helpful in boosting your brand recognition.

8.  Call Back Reminders and Scheduling

The best predictive dialers have callback scheduling or reminders. This feature provides you reminders for a callback at a specific time. If customers get calls at their preferred time, it will be easier to convert them into promising leads.

Once an agent logs in to your system, they will get a pop-up list of callbacks. With this, agents can easily follow up certain customers who want a callback on a particular time or day. This kind of feature can also help businesses get more and better leads.

9.  Call Recording

Regardless of how you operate your business, an important feature of a predictive dialer is a call recording function. This is ideal for training purposes since managers can listen to the previous calls whenever required. The saved recordings can be used for future reference without needing to use another device or equipment to do call recording.

A predictive dialer that stores and records calls in HD quality may also allow saving recordings on the cloud where you or your agents may access the audio files anytime and with ease.

10. Answering Machine Detection

Answering Machine Detection (AMD) is a crucial feature of predictive dialers because it filters out the numbers that end up on answering machines.

Before passing calls to agents, predictive dialers assure calls are answered by a real human voice. This feature can help save more time since agents will be connected to the calls only when answered by the customers.

11. Lead Management

Lead management generally includes practices and methods that are made to generate new business leads that are operated through different marketing campaigns. If your business runs a lot of campaigns, it’s best to check the lead management feature of predictive dialers.

Dialers with lead management capability can distribute and sort the best leads first through analyzing the dispositions and reminders aligned with the leads. The feature may start with tracking the records of every sale based on the leads or automate lead capturing.

12. Customized Dial Time

Every country has a different time zone and an important feature of predictive dialers is a customized dial time. This feature enables the dialers to filter out the numbers based on the area codes and time zone. It also ensures calling on a particular time based on such attributes.

A good predictive dialer matches the area code, country name, and contact list time. Then, it will start to dial the numbers at the best possible time when potential customers are available.

13. Filter-Based Calling

Every company manager defines different rules based on geography, time zone or various demographics to target groups. When predictive dialers start dialing the numbers, these will filter out the particular numbers that are outside the defined rules. With this, it’s helpful for businesses to get concentrated and more focused results.

14. DNC Management

A Do Not Call (DNC) feature provides reliability to limit telemarketing phone calls. Generally, DNC is the list of the contact numbers that are registered under the government regulatory for not getting any promotional calls. If companies contact DNC numbers, they have to pay expensive fines to the telecom authorities.

Some predictive dialers provide a DNC management feature that checks for any DNC numbers and screens them out, ensuring fine-free calls by your agents.

15. Predictive Dialing Function

One of the most important features of a predictive dialer is the predictive dialing function. It allows the dialers to dial contact numbers by using predictive algorithms, which connect calls to agents only when the real customers answer. This function results in more direct customer connections and eliminates unproductive numbers from your call lists.

16. KPI Statistics

Depending on your preferred predictive dialers, these systems can collect more information on the performance of the agents. These serve as KPI, or Key Performance Indicators, statistics that can help business owners and managers determine if their marketing campaigns are on the right track. This feature may also shed light on certain aspects of your sales approach that require improvement, like reducing downtime, to provide an excellent service to your customers.

17. Local Caller ID

More often than not, most potential customers don’t want to get calls from unfamiliar numbers. This is why having a predictive dialer with a local caller ID may come in handy for your business. The reason behind this is that it enables you to boost contact rates as potential leads are more likely to answer calls from local numbers. So, if you don’t want to scare away your target prospects by having an unknown number, make sure to utilize predictive dialers that have this feature and see the difference for your leads.

Bottom Line

Any business could find predictive dialers helpful for connecting to their clients and customers. However, you will receive the most benefits from using a predictive dialer by choosing a system packed with these important features. So, if you decide to incorporate predictive dialers into your sales efforts, make sure to choose your predictive dialer wisely to get the most out of your investment.