Yes, and no. The story of dialing in the last few years has been one of a technology that matured, and then was overrun by changes in technology outside the box.
By that I mean that the basic functions involved in predictive dialing (or any other dialing, for that matter) were long ago created and encoded into software. The rest of the cost of a predictive dialer was the cost of the high-powered dedicated box needed to make it happen, and to integrate it into the list system, and to the agent desktop.
It wasn’t so long ago that predictive dialers were a simple purchase — you bought the one that gave you the most talk time per hour, or the one that had the best answering machine detect. What you looked for in a dialer was dialing features. That’s changing immensely.
Like most other hardware technologies, predictive dialers are responding to changes in the nature of the call center. Nowadays you want more flexibility with your agents, inbound or outbound. You want to link your hardware systems together: switches and computers, dialers and voice systems.
More than anything else, you want to choose the software applications that make sense for your business, and get cost-effective hardware to run them. Decoupling the software apps from the hardware is the most impressive development to come along in years.
Predictive dialer vendors, like PBX and ACD vendors before them, have been forced to adapt to a changing world. People are less inclined to choose a standalone system they can’t program and that can only be connected to a limited range of compatible peripherals.
Predictive dialing has always been a software application. It required a great deal of processing power, so vendors put their specialized software onto high-powered computers, most of them with a closed architecture. But the research and development was always geared to better dialing algorithms, more sophisticated call tracking features, and better database management — essentially software apps.
What started as a great idea for outbound telemarketing and collections — fire out more calls than necessary to maximize agent productivity — became the platform on which software companies continued to refine and develop new features for handling calls.
It was such a good idea that companies in other areas (telemarketing software, especially) began adding predictive dialing modules to their systems. The logic was good: if dialing features are mainly software, and powerful generic processors are available to run them, there’s no reason not to create a whole new category of product — the PC-based (or at least client/server-based) dialer.
The traditional hardware/dialing vendors are now changing to match. Several of them have taken their core technologies, enhanced them, and are presenting them to call centers in a new light. They are creating systems for managing all aspects of the call flow. They let agents make calls in predictive mode, and receive incoming calls as well.
To facilitate that, dialer makers have incorporated a technology to blend agents; this allows a single station to handle either incoming or outgoing calls. And although it’s not used widely yet, it’s growing. The dialer is steadily losing its identity as a purely outbound object. It’s got to act like, and interact with, inbound call routing systems. Because it’s increasingly unlikely that a given center will be doing all of one kind of calling, or all of another. Recent information from Datamonitor suggested that the market for outbound dialers was actually expected to increase in the next few years.
Since few call centers are now dedicated to outbound traffic, integration with inbound is the highest priority for the vendors of high-end outbound dialers. Their strengths is clearly in the software that routes the calls, downloads the lists, tracks the results and coordinates the customer information on the back-end. If this sounds an awful lot like the new CIS software, you are right. If it sounds like computer telephony integration, you are also right.
The most successful predictive dialer companies right now — the ones making the most interesting and useful technology — are the ones that have rethought the logic of the outbound call center and recast their dialer as an indispensable component of the inbound and outbound center. For all of them, the selling point is not the power of the dialing engine, but the value-added capabilities of the companion software.
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