Outbound calls allow agents to make sales, resolve ongoing customer queries, and welcome new customers to the brand.
Yet, no matter the strategy, a dialer improves how contact centers make outbound calls by:
- Recommending the next-best customer to call
- Saving agents time by auto-initiating calls
- Matching agent availability to customer lists
Many more capabilities are also available to enhance the various outbound use cases. Although, these often hinge on the type of dialer a contact center chooses.
What is an Outbound Dialer? Definition
Outbound dialers automate the process in which an agent calls a customer, improving contact center efficiency.
To achieve this goal, most modern outbound dialers also:
- Skip past answering machines
- Allow agents to manage calls from one space
- Monitor the success of outbound engagements
- Give agents the full history of each customer they call
The final benefit hinges on integrations, especially with CRM. With this customer information, dialers enable a more strategic approach to making outbound dialing.
For example, contact centers can target specific segments, play to customer preferences, and make more personalized customer suggestions.
The integrated dialer fills the agent desktop with information about customers, their call history, and campaign goals to enable this.
Types of Outbound Dialers
There are many types of dialers agents use for outbound calling. Often, the dialer that the contact center opts for depends on the use case.
- Preview dialer – Once an agent sets their status as “available”, this dialer populates their desktop with customer insights that are relevant to the upcoming call. The customer then has a predefined time frame to get to grips with that information before they route through to the customer.
- Predictive dialer – The predictive dialer forecasts agent availability and call duration to automatically match an agent with a customer. It then dials customers in quick succession to minimize agent idle time.
- Progressive dialer – Similar to the predictive dialer, this solution assesses agent availability and automatically places one call for every available agent. Yet, it also disconnects a call after a predetermined amount of “ringing” and puts the agent through to a new customer to maximize productivity.
- Adaptive dialer – Like the previous two dialers, it predicts agent availability to route calls. Yet, it also matches agents with customers based on algorithms informed by CRM or other enterprise databases.
Within many contact center as a software (CCaaS) solutions, there are often multiple types of dialers on offer. As such, operations can temporarily adopt various types of dialer to meet the needs of each outbound campaign.
Outbound Dialer Use Cases
There are many examples of outbound strategies that a dialer can kickstart. For example, a B2B technology provider may wish to inform customers of a new product feature. Meanwhile, a company within a highly regulated industry may make a call to a new customer to ensure that their purchase happened compliantly.
So, while outbound dialer strategies typically revolve around sales, there are many other uses cases. A proactive call to answer burning customer questions, gather feedback, or simply introduce the customer to the company are all common examples.
Often, companies combine use cases such as these as part of a welcome call initiative, adding in an upsell suggestion towards the end of the call too. Doing so may help to drive customer value.
A final use case is to make a renewal call, in which the agent can offer to renew the service right there and then. Consequently, they lower customer effort while increasing the chances of customer retention. Setting a dialer to automatically call customers who have a deal that will soon expire facilitates this. Although, it does require a CRM integration.
For further excellent examples of CRM integrations, read our article: Contact Centre Integrations That Will Bolster Your CRM Strategy