In most telemarketing companies the predictive dialer is interfaced toCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This generates the call lists and the report call attempts.

It also analyses the unsuccessful calls to determine the number called needs to be called back later, or be manually called, or auto-dialed by an agent to respond to an answering machine message.

So when complains come in about telemarketers it is not always the dialers to be blamed. The CRM is responsible for badly targeted lists, poor scripting, inefficient agents, flouting of laws thus defaming the telemarketing industry.

In earlier days there was a clear distinction between outbound andinbound calls. Outbound calls were aggressive, to the point, and call first ask questions later types. While inbound calls were very sweetly answered.

Today where every outbound call is a precious contact and every inbound call a potential customer, CRM ismerging both call types . Agents are trained not to be aggressive except, of course, for collections, surveys etc. This call blending feature offered by CRM permits agents to move between inbound, outbound and web-bound calls. This eliminates the idle time for agents, increases outbound traffic, when inbound call volume is low, thus maximizing productivity.

Another interesting feature offered by most dialers is same-agent and scheduled callbacks . This permits an inbound calling customer to be called back by the same agent. The outbound calls of the agent are tagged for this and each agent can own a list or a subset of numbers.

Yet another one is the Multi-Number Calling . These days most customers have many numbers: one at home, one at work, cellphones, pagers. With this feature it is easy for the agent to reach this customer for business such as collections.

Many provide the Do-Not-Call list facility.

The documentation facility is provided to record database for reporting and analysis.