Predictive Dialing

Predictive dialing is the most automated and sophisticated of all the outbound calling methods. Here's how it works.

A number of agents will all be logged into the same campaign, consisting of at least hundreds and probably thousands of records, each including telephone numbers of the people or businesses that are going to be called. All this information will be held on a network server, with links to all agents.
The network server will also have a link to a predictive dialing engine, which may be a physical device (hard dialer) connected directly into the PSTN, or it may be a piece of software (Soft Dialer) possibly located on its own dedicated server, with links to an ACD.
As agents become available, the server and/ or the dialer decide what order to dial the campaign numbers in, and calls are then initiated either directly through the ACD, or managed directly by the dialer itself.
If there is no answer after a defined number of seconds the dialer will hang up. For all other call outcomes, it will often strive to screen out everything but live calls, and put just these outcomes through to agents. But see also Answering Machine Detection and Faxes and Modems.
At the same time as a live call is being picked up on the agent's headset, the application sitting on the network server will screen pop the details for the called party on to the agent's screen.
Smart software in the dialer will be monitoring the data for all call outcomes. It will also be measuring agent performance in terms of average talk and wrap times, and variances in them. This information will (should!) be used to recalculate how many trunk lines (and ports) the dialer should be dialing out on, every time there is a change in campaign parameters, e.g. in the number of available agents on a campaign. At high levels of no answers and answering machines, this should mean at least several trunks being dialed for each agent who is waiting.
This use of overdialing will clearly keep wait times between calls for agents down. If not controlled, it will also lead to lots of abandoned calls. So the role of the smart software in the dialer is to achieve low wait times by overdialing, while keeping abandoned calls down to acceptable levels at the same time.
And in order to do this, the smart software should also be constantly reviewing all activity to keep its overdial algorithm up to date. As a guide to these activities, see the data required of you in the Campaign Wizard, in setting up a campaign.

The very best predictive dialing performance is obtained when those responsible for compiling calling lists for individual campaigns ensure that the data is reasonably uniform. Where this is not the case, and where sudden and marked changes keepoccurring, especially in call outcome distributions, the dialer may have to rein in the dialing rate, and wait times may rise.

Warning

Some dialers are called 'predictive', when all they offer is a predial capability.