How a Predictive Dialer Works

In a conventional dialer system, if you have a hundred agents working on it, for example, the dialer will dial a number of calls sometimes crudely based on the phone line to agent ratio—let’s say two to one. This means that for each available agent, the system will dial the phone numbers of two potential customers. The dialing ratio doesn’t change.  

In a predictive-dialer system, the dialer will monitor each call and determine the outcome of the call. The system will immediately strip out any unproductive results, such as busy calls (these are usually queued for automatic redial), no answers, and invalid numbers, verify the number of agents available and the typical call duration, and adjust the dial rate. 

Some predictive dialers incorporate also fax/answering machine detection, which tries to determine if a live person or a machine picked up the call. Today, most dialers have some sort of recognition feature; however, be aware that tuning the device to the public network is the key to making it work properly.  

The adjustment of the dial rate is necessary because if not enough calls are made ahead, agents will sit idle, whereas if there are too many calls made and there are not enough agents to handle them, then the call is typically dropped. A predictive dialer system will adjust the dial rate appropriately to avoid both situations.  

An advanced predictive dialer determines and uses many operating characteristics that it learns during the calling campaign and adjusts automatically to the pattern of an ongoing campaign. Examples of such statistics include call-connection rates (both current and average for recent past days by hour of the day), average agent connection time, and geographic location dialed. It uses these statistics continually to make sophisticated predictions so as to minimize agent idle time while controlling occurrences of nuisance calls (and consequently dropped calls), which are answered calls without the immediate availability of an agent. An advanced predictive dialer can readily maintain the ratio of nuisance calls to answered calls at less than a fraction of 1 percent while still dialing ahead. However, this level of performance may require a sufficiently large critical mass of agents. Conversely, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a high talk-time percentage with a lower number of agents without increasing dropped calls.