Sales and Customer Care teams play the vital role of representing your company to clients and customers, so it’s paramount for them to count on tools to help them gather information and handle customers successfully, in a personalized and efficient way. Evolving from manual dialing with a dialpad inside a CRM, to auto-dialing and click-to-call; dialing technology has become a major player to improve competitiveness in both sales and customer satisfaction. 

There are several dialers available on the Salesforce AppExchange, such as the Automatic Dialer (also known as an Auto Dialer). These applications automatically dial outbound calls and try to connect to potential or existing customers. There are three main types available: Power Dialer, Predictive Dialer, and Progressive Dialer. There isn’t one single dialer that's better than the others, and none of them are perfect. You just need to identify which one works the best for your needs.

• Main types of Dialers:
• Power Dialer
• Predictive Dialer
• Progressive Dialer

This article will shed some light on these three, along with their advantages and disadvantages so you can assess which one can take your operations to the next level.

Power Dialer

What is it?

This type of dialer is based on automatic dialing technology. Power dialers basically take a call list from Salesforce and automatically starts dialing one contact after the other, only transferring to an available agent when a live call gets connected. This means reps won’t be wasting their valuable time if a number is busy or while the call goes unanswered.

Imagine the productivity boost your team can attain if they can focus all their time and energy on actually talking to clients. You can also leverage multi line dialing, and only transfer calls to available agents when there’s an actual human on the line.

Use cases:

Power dialers prove fruitful for those teams with a rich data source (Caller list) in their CRM and a large volume of contacts in their caller lists. Companies can make more calls per hour using them so this type of dialer is ideal for standard follow-up calls and cold calling, when most customer interactions are pretty much the same.

Benefits and Shortfalls:

• Benefits:
• As an auto-dialer, it prevents manual dialing and dials contacts one after the other. Thus saving agents’ time and increasing their productivity. 
• The power dialer only starts the next call when the agent is ready to get connected. This gives them time to wrap up the previous call and gather relevant information for the following one.
• When integrated with CRMs like Salesforce, information related to the customer will be enriched by disposition codes and notes the agent can take, adding them to the corresponding customer records.
• As there is human touch attached to the call (agent talking directly to the customer), it’s always one step ahead of the self-serviced call and yields better outputs for the companies.
• Even though the caller list is generated and dialed automatically, the agent has the power of leaving voice messages or setting the call back option if he wants.

• Shortfalls:
• It’s not fully automatic. Thus it’s vital to monitor the maximum time between the calls that an agent can take and set the dialer accordingly.
• As the following call is only dialed when the agent becomes available, sometimes agents have to hold between two calls and some time can be wasted.

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Predictive Dialer

What is it?

As the name suggests, a predictive dialer can predict when the next agent will become available and starts dialing calls aforehand, moving on from one unanswered call to the next until a connection is established. Only then, will the dialer route the call to the next available agent. 

This is achieved by automatic dialing technology that uses algorithms to calculate when to dial the next call, estimating when the next agent will become available. 

Considering the average time it takes for calls to be answered and the total number of agents, a predictive dialer can start dialing. Based on these stats, the dialer calculates the number of dials to be made in an hour. The algorithm does consider the cases like call not answered, call drops, answered by answering machine etc. The dialing behaviour can be changed depending on the company’s requirements. 

Use cases:

Predictive dialing can be applicable in cases where a company needs to do a survey or a short conversation is required.

This system can be used by companies who aim to get a higher volume of communication between agents and the clients.

Benefits and Shortfalls:

• Benefits:
• As computers calculate the dialing time, the number of calls per hour is definitely higher and results in higher productivity and revenue for the company.
• Agent’s idle time is reduced.
• Multiple numbers are called at the same time.
• The number of staff required is reduced to a greater extent as most of the work is done by the system.

• Shortfalls:
• Using predictive dialers aiming at making the best use of agents’ time can backfire, as calculations are based on averages. This may lead to customers answering the call and having to wait for the agent to become available, affecting the abandon rate.
• It’s necessary to be continually updated on legal regulations because some countries have regulations to keep a check on abandon rate.
• Sometimes higher, rapid rates may affect the motivation and energy of the agents. A higher rate may mean less rest for them which is less than the average rest time required by humans.
• Chances of losing a customer. If there are abandoned calls, customers may be unhappy with the company thus resulting in losing a prospective customer.

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Progressive Dialer

What is it?

Progressive dialers are similar to Predictive dialers in terms that both initiate outbound calls automatically and sequentially. They both transfer the call to the agent only when there is a live connection. But Progressive dialers take into consideration abandonment and connection rate. This makes the major difference between the two. With a progressive dialer,  there will always be an agent to answer. It also doesn’t call multiple numbers at the same time, as Predictive dialing does. Progressive dialing proves to be a middle path for those who’d rather balance delivering personalized attention and achieving efficiency. 

Use cases:

This type of dialing is perfect, for example, for companies that carry out surveys and are looking to go into further depth in more detailed personalized calls with specific clients.

Benefits and Shortfalls:

• Benefits:
• Abandon rate is reduced by a huge amount.
• Agent gets time to gather information like in power dialing.
• It has proved to have a better success ratio as there are fewer hang-ups than Predictive dialing.
• There is a way to leave a voice message.

• Shortfalls:
• It’s not able to yield higher calling rates than with Predictive dialing.
  

All in all, it is a known fact that there cannot be one solution for all. Nonetheless, it can be a smart decision for companies to analyze their target audience, their typical interactions and weigh the pros and cons of the solution available in the market. This article has stated pros and cons for all three dialers. We are sure this will help you make an intelligent decision.