Call Center Dialers

The outbound operations usually are extremely challenging for telecom managers. These are the kind of operations in which just keeping the lights on is not enough, and usually the difference between a good installation and a bad one can make a huge difference in terms of productivity and influence directly the company’s bottom line.  

The deployment of devices called diallers (British English) or dialers (American English) designed to automatically dial telephone numbers, can generate significative productivity gains. However, you should not have the delusion that just buying the devices generates the productivity gains by default. The telecom manager has to understand that the productivity gains come from a well-balanced combination of three factors:  

• Well-chosen equipment 

• A good installation and proper configuration 

• A good management of the tool in the day-by-day operations  

Dialers are crucial tools for outbound call centers, because they free the agents of the work of dialing and make it possible for them to concentrate their effort in actually talking with the clients. If badly implemented, dialers may produce lackluster results and increase operational costs.  

In addition to the basic function of dialing and transferring the call for an human attendant, the dialer device can also perform several other tasks, such as announce verbal messages (called a robocall in the United States) or transmit digital data (like SMS messages).  

In addition, these devices usually can verify the dialed numbers and change them to seamlessly provide services that otherwise require lengthy access codes to be dialed.  Typically, a dialer can automatically insert and modify the numbers depending on the time of day, country, or area code dialed, allowing also the selection of the service providers who offer the best rates.

For example, a dialer could be programmed to use one service provider for international calls and another for mobile calls. These processes are known as prefix insertion and least-cost routing.  

Although most dialers can execute the least-cost routing, it is interesting to note that in large installations it may not be ideal to do so because that usually means the number of trunks (T1/E1) supported by each dialer box may not be enough for all dialing circumstances.

For example, if in a particular moment you have lots of fix-to-mobile calls, the number of mobile trunks available in each box may not be enough. This is the reason why it usually makes more sense to pool the trunks groups in a large voice switch and do the routing from there.  

Dialer systems are commonly used by telemarketing organizations involved in B2C (business-to-consumer) calling, because it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time. Market-survey companies and debt-collection services that need to contact and personally speak to a lot of people by telephone may also use dialers.  

More commonly, dialers are now being used as a quick and easy way to automate all types of calls that would otherwise be made manually by a call center, such as welcome calls for new customers, customer service call backs, appointment confirmations/reminders, or even for the automation of large numbers of ad hoc calls that might need to take place (such as by a taxi company or a parcel-delivery service). The basic idea behind the device is that if a person were to sit down and manually dial one thousand people, a large percentage of these calls will not result in contact with someone at the other end. 

Out of one thousand calls made, typically only about 25 to 35 percent would actually connect to a live person. Of the rest, a large number (often 40 to 60 percent) won’t be answered at all, around 10 percent might be answering machines, faxes, modems, or other electronic devices, around 5 percent of numbers would be busy, and the rest will result in network errors or be identified as invalid numbers. For call centers that need to make large numbers of outbound calls, this represents a big problem. Typically, in manual-dialing environments, any given agent will spend around 90 percent of his or her time listening to the phone ring, waiting to talk to someone, or dealing with invalid numbers, or answering machines, and only about 10 percent of the time actually doing what they are really there to do.  

The benefit of dialers in general is that they can make many more calls in a much shorter period of time than an agent manually dialing each phone number. If the dialer encounters a busy signal or no answer, it will schedule itself to dial the number again later without human intervention. The system can also keep track of an entire campaign’s progress in real time—which would be nearly impossible if attempted manually.