Predictive Dialing vs Manual Dialing: Which Is More Suitable For Businesses
Time is money in business, and excellent communication with clients is critical to success. The process of reaching out to customers is one of the most important components of customer communication.
This is where the issue over predictive dialing versus manual dialing becomes relevant. Predictive dialing is an automated procedure that connects agents to customers by using algorithms, whereas manual dialing needs employees to dial numbers manually.
Both systems have benefits as well as drawbacks, and the decision on which to utilize can have an impact on a company’s efficiency and success. In this blog, we will look at the distinctions between predictive dialing and manual dialing to help you decide which strategy is best for your company.
What Does Dialer Do?
A Dialer is a piece of software that makes phone calls. In an outbound call center, it is the first way to get in touch with potential buyers. You can make and receive calls with it.
Every call center manager will tell you that dialers are the most important part of a call center. It’s meant to be a way to talk to people.
So, the performance, effectiveness, and return on investment (ROI) of a call center are all directly tied to the type of dialer and what it can do.
If you can’t think of a way to cut down on the time you spend on calls in real life and you dial numbers by hand, you could use something called a “predictive dialer.”
By cutting down on the time workers spend waiting, the predictive dialer systems can make them much more productive. This system effortlessly calls a list of phone numbers and connects answered calls to available agents. Let’s look at why predictive dialing is better than manualdialing and what other major differences there are between the two.
What is Manual Dialing?
A manual dialer is a simple dialer where the agents physically dial the phone numbers from the list of customers. It is the dialer that most small and medium-sized call centers have used for years.
With a manual dialer, a worker can choose a number from a list or type it in on a keypad. The agents must then wait for the call to connect, which could be busy, wrong, or go to an answering machine. Manual dialing is the least efficient way to make outbound calls because it can’t sort these calls.
Advantage of Manual Dialing
With a manual dialer, the agent dials a number and enters information about the call such as the caller’s name, the call’s state, any notes or reminders, and so on. These details, as well as the time of the call, the length of the call, and a recording of the call, can all be saved in the database.
When all of this information is put together, it can be used to judge how well the call center is doing. In the same way, it can help keep track of agents’ success graphs by logging details, call records, and idle time.
Disadvantage of Manual Dialing
Manual dialing seems easy enough for a call center that is just starting, but it is also the least efficient method. With manual dialing, workers spend more time finding, dialing, and redialing in case of busy tones, wrong numbers, and answering machines than actually talking on the call.
Agents have a hard time getting in touch with customers because it takes time. In the end, both the number of contacts and the amount of money made take a hit.
What is Predictive Dialing?
A predictive dialer dials numbers instantly by making smart guesses about when an agent will be free to take a call. Based on how long an agent’s average call lasts and a ratio that has already been set for the campaign, a predictive dialer starts calling multiple numbers at once before the agent finishes the last call.
Advantage of Predictive Dialing
This type of dialing cuts down on the time it takes for an agent to get through to a live customer who is ready to talk. Also, it smartly screens out busy tones, wrong numbers, call waiting, and even answering machines. A predictive dialer’s biggest benefit is that it always sends an available agent to a live person.
In two ways, a predictive dialer does a better job than a human dialer. First of all, it helps increase the number of live contacts and time on call by a lot.
Second, it cuts down on the time an agent has to wait by dialing the next number before the last call is over and filtering out calls that don’t go through.
A predictive dialer makes more calls than a manual dialer and keeps workers from being idle for a lot less time. With predictive dialing, call centers can also use the benefits of calling people in different time zones.
Disadvantage of Predictive Dialing
Predictive dialers might have undesirable consequences. Customers hear silence for 2-3 seconds before an agent on the other end speaks up in predictive dialing. This is the time it takes for the predictive dialer to recognize a human voice and send the call to an available agent.
Customers, on the other hand, may become frustrated since they must wait to hear from the other end. Furthermore, many calls may be connected to a live customer while no agent is available to answer those calls. Such calls are referred to as dropped or abandoned calls.
Conclusion
Predictive dialing enables businesses to increase the number of deals they successfully close by increasing the number of calls they make while maintaining flexible call handling. It increases lead management and reporting by providing greater dialing assistance in a cloud-hosted environment and offering easier interaction with CRM programs. Both of these features are offered at an affordable price. Call centers will eventually be able to track performance and generate insights, which will result in increased profitability. The use of predictive dialing to manage high call volumes is vastly superior to manual dialing in terms of both increasing agent productivity and improving response times.