Predictive Auto Dialer System
The Ultimate Telemarketing Lead Generation Tool

Clearly anyone claiming that a predictive auto dialer can achieve a return on investment within 2-3 months is going to be challenged. Such claims should trigger red flags. The irony is that in the case of predictive dialers such returns are not unusual.

Qualifications obviously apply. Returns of this magnitude can only be achieved by businesses operating in B2C markets and their products or services must be appropriate to those markets. For example, we wouldn't suggest using a predictive dialer system to sell capital equipment to large corporations. On the other hand, segments related to consumer finance: debt collection, mortgage finance and insurance are areas where auto dialers have achieved substantial productivity increases.

Another critical qualification relates to the quality of the list or data base used to drive an outbound predictive dialer. If the list is out of date or composed of inappropriate or over used contacts, it's very unlikely that auto-dialer technology will achieve a return on investment.

Predictive Auto Dialer - increased productivity

In speaking of productivity, we are referring to talk time. The time spent by an agent speaking on the phone rather than dialing or preparing to dial a phone. Without the assistance of a predictive dialer an agent is unlikely to spend more than 10-20 minutes in the hour actually speaking. The rest of the time is spent dialing numbers that don't result in live voice contact. They are phone lines that maybe engaged, not answered, disconnected, connected to an answering machine or fax, and so on. Predictive dialers identify and filter filter out these calls so the agent can speak with live contacts for between forty and fifty five minutes in the hour.

It's on the above basis that a predictive auto dialer can be expected to deliver an increase in productivity of between 100% and 450% over an operation where agents are either manually dialing or using a modem dialer.

Another way of viewing this would be to consider a small 8 agent call center. By using a predictive auto dialer they can achieve the same volume of successful outbound calls as a team of 16 people, but without incurring the staff costs of an additional 8 agents. Based on current rates for call center agents in the U.S and Europe, that saving will pay for an investment in a predictive dialer system within 8-10 weeks.

The above projection is conservative for two reasons:

(1) We have nominated an increase in productivity of just 100%, which is lower than that typically achieved.

(2) Our calculation doesn't take into account increased revenue resulting from doubling the volume of successful live contacts. Depending on the type campaign it would be reasonable to assume an increase of at least fifty percent in: sales, sales leads, debts recovered, funds raised and so on.

In the past predictive dialers were a major capital investment and even taking into account lower staff costs the term required to achieve a return on investment was a great deal longer than today. The development of smarter algorithms, faster servers and viable predictive dialer software have combined to bring the cost of a predictive dialer systems down to a level where even SMBs can justify there use.

Hosted predictive dialer and virtual predictive dialer services have lowered the threshold to accessing predictive auto dialer technology even further.

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