If preview dialing is slow and methodical, and predictive dialing is dialing on steroids, you have to wonder how to characterize auto dialing.
To be clear, here we’re discussing auto dialing that doesn’t involve predictive dialing. That’s a special case of an auto dialer that attempts to connect agents to calls as soon as possible. There are cases where you don’t want to involve an agent, or only in certain cases. You may need an auto dialer.
An auto dialer is usually used in three cases:
- Notifications & Reminders: a call is kicked off to remind someone of something, or to act as an alarm. Messages are usually very brief.
- Broadcasts and announcements: a telemarketer might have a message broadcast to a list announcing some item is now available for sale. An organization might send an announcement to interested members announcing the time and place of the next general meeting. A school could send a message to parents announcing a weather closure for schools and the changed bus numbers as a result.
- Polls and IVRs: this can be as simple as playing an audio file prompting call recipients to press 1 for “Yes” and 9 for “No”. It can be as complex as your (Interactive Voice Response) IVR system allows you to make it. Previous choices can guide the flow of the call and what further options are presented.
There are a few factors that determine how the auto dialer chooses and dials calls:
- Your queuing strategy: It’s important to make sure you have the right contacts ready to go
- Scheduling: You probably don’t want to dial around the clock. You may only want to dial in a narrow time slot. Or you may just want to dial everything as fast as possible now.
- Capacity: Your trunk will only allow you so many concurrent calls. In fact, your provider probably has a much lower limit on how many new calls can be started in a second. This isn’t advertised as widely as the concurrent calls number, but it plays a big role in the success of your outbound auto dialing campaign if it’s too low. For instance, many PRI providers would allow 23 concurrent calls, but only 5 call setups per second. Any more and the subsequent call setups would fail.
So given the speed, power, and the ability to collect a lot of data without agents, what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Advantages:
- Speed, Power and ability to collect data without agents: You can have it go to an agent if you want. Just have a branch that transfers to a queue or goes to a DID for your inbound campaign.
- You can add answering machine detection and alter the message depending on whether it’s connected to a likely machine or not.
Disadvantages:
- Regulations: It’s even worse than with predictive dialing. If you recall, you’re supposed to connect auto dialed calls to an agent within 2 seconds of connecting in most automatic dialing scenarios. This requirement doesn’t just go away because you’ve got an auto dialer. As a result, in many places there are very few people you are legally allowed to dial this way. Sometimes pollsters get a pass. Sometimes it’s politicians. Often you have to give explicit permission to be dialed this way. This makes it still applicable to groups and organizations, and maybe even schools and clubs. It’s going to be very problematic for most outbound cold-calling campaigns.
- People hang up on unsolicited auto dials a lot. It’s important to collect data at various points at the call just to report that the caller hadn’t hung up by that point. One pollster I talked to said nobody ever completes the survey, and there’s a tremendous dropoff after each question. Don’t count on getting data from all or even most of your answered calls. I suspect the fact that you’re not being rude to a live person reduces the taboo on hanging up on the caller.
Due to the strong disadvantages, auto dialing has become much more of a niche call center product. It’s invaluable to those who can use it effectively. Those who don’t fall under a blanket exemption may have a much harder time finding an effective use for it, however.