Dial-IQ or Predictive Dialer: What’s the Right Fit for your Organization?
By Nick Hedges
May 8, 2021 — Last month we rolled out a new and improved Dial-IQ, the market’s first, full-featured intelligent dialer solution, fully integrated with a comprehensive sales lead management platform.
One of the biggest challenges we faced with Dial-IQ was balancing between high-quality consumer experiences and added sales productivity from multi-line dialing. We believe we have created the right harmony between speed and positive customer experience, without crossing the line into predictive dialer territory and its associated negatives.
Predictive dialers are one of the most misunderstood dialing technologies, probably because different companies label different dialer software features as being predictive.
A predictive dialer is a type of list dialing technology that dials through a list of leads assigned to it. A predictive dialer relies on the fact that most outbound calls do not end up connecting with a live person and thus for every successful call, one predicts that a certain percentage will be unsuccessful. Call centers using predictive dialers typically want as little down time as possible, which means their dialers call more numbers than there are available reps – sometimes as many as 10 calls for each sales rep. This ensures reps are always busy but also frustrates consumers.
Pros and cons of a predictive dialer
There are many benefits and disadvantages of a predictive dialer. Determining whether predictive dialing is the right thing for your company will largely be determined by your answer to these questions:
- How big is your contact center, if less than 40, a predictive dialer might not be a good fit?
- How good do you want the experience of your customers and prospects to be?
- How costly are your leads and are you OK with abandoning 2-3% of your calls with every call attempt?
Leads360′s approach
Most of Leads360′s customers operate in a high velocity consumer sales environment and currently do not fall into the category of a good fit for predictive dialers. Usually our customers spend a considerable sum of money on leads, wish to drive as much value from each lead as possible, and sell products and services that typically require more than a one-call-close.
Leads360’s Dial-IQ brings dialing with intelligence into focus. Dial-IQ offers both a progressive dialer that calls one lead after another and a multi-line dialer that calls up to four lines per agent. Both solutions benefit from intelligent prioritization, lead distribution, contact strategy workflow, and scheduled follow-up capabilities, ensuring the highest level of efficiency in converting prospects into customers.
While traditional predictive dialers may increase call time, they also can cause drops when the statistical model used to calculate the number of outbound calls to make misfires. Usually this happens either as a operator error by loading incorrect seed data or jumbling together leads that are not similar to each other (different stages in the pipeline, timezones, etc.). Dial-IQ on the other hand allows administrators to tailor the dialing strategy to the leads they have in the pipeline. This ensures the highest level of real-time flexibility in tuning who you are going to call next, and how many calls you will be making at once. Dial-IQ in combination with Lead Manager ensures you are segmenting your leads according to the likelihood of them answering and reducing the number of concurrent calls made in accordance with how likely the lead is to pick up, thus reducing the number of dropped calls.
Bottom line –combining our prioritization and distribution engines in Lead Manager with our progressive dialer that never drops a call and our multi-line dialer that drives velocity; customers can maximize the hard-earned value of high quality leads, while also ensuring the highest level of efficiency with lower quality leads.
