What are the chances of actually reaching someone when you dial their number? The odds are very low that you will connect with the right party on your first attempt – you often reach voicemail, an answering machine, a busy signal or just no answer whatsoever! This is very frustrating for those that work in companies that do outbound calling – being unable to connect calls wastes a lot of time and is very unproductive.

To help with this problem, several innovative ideas have sprung up over the years. Early solutions were auto diallers – which was able to call pre-programmed numbers by touching a single key – something similar to speed dialling. Other more advanced dialling devices emerged soon after, which were designed for call centres or companies that dealt with outbound calling – these large scale automated diallers are preview diallers, progressive diallers and predictive diallers.

Preview diallers work by agents initiating calls by clicking on a phone number that has been programmed into the dialler – this assures that an agent will be available if a connection is made. The phone agents view call information prior to the call being placed and can decide whether or not to initiate the call.

A progressive dialler monitors an agent’s status, and only initiates outbound calls when an agent is available to take the call. The timing of the call attempt is determined by the device, not the agent. Progressive dialling presents contact information to the call centre agent prior to dialling the phone number. The agent is given time to see the contact information prior to the dialler automatically placing the call, but does not have control over placing the call.

Predictive diallers are more advanced out of all the automated diallers – they use sophisticated algorithms to match agent availability to live connections. Predictive diallers automatically place calls from call lists, detect a live answer and then direct the call to an available agent. They can adjust the call pacing to match agent availability. Diallers anticipate when the next agent will become available, based upon key statistics. The predictive dialler works by dialling the contacts number from the database. It drops unanswered calls, answering machines, busy lines and fax machine replied lines and routes the calls answered by a real human to the call centre agent. This means that the call centre agents only have to work with actual customers, thus increasing work efficiency and productivity.