Ever thought how a call center functions? How it handles so many outbound calls and incoming calls? Call centers of business companies, like mail order catalogue firms, customer support for hardware and software, usually answer a lot of incoming telephone calls of customers or makes outgoing calls to customers.

In such situations and many others where the individual identity of the caller is not relevant and in situations where time translates to money, thePredictive Dialer is used.

A Dialer provides the connection between the internet or a network of computers and an analog telephone. In this era of telemarketing, many business problems have increased, yet there is the urgent and unavoidable need

•  to improve customer care

•  to sell to customers with automated systems

•  to increase personal productivity

•  and most important of all to control costs( one way to do this is to employ fewer live agents to handle routine calls)

And from the public, there is forever the demand for information. This offers a lot of scope for generating revenue, by offering and charging for this valuable information. All this is achieved through the use of dialers.

In case of call centers too, the dialer generates outbound calls and connects them to the agents of the call center. There are five basic types of dialers:

1. Preview Dialer-(the other names are screen dialing, cursor dialing, power dialing) Prior to placing the call, the called party's account information and/or phone number appears on the PC screen. The agent previews this and then manually initiates the dialing.
2. Power Dialer-This is a typical bulk dialer consisting of a list of numbers to be called, outgoing phone lines and agents. This displays the busy, unanswered calls, and connects live hello to the agent. If no agent is available then it abandons the call or plays a pre-recorded message.
3. Progressive Dialer-the system makes sure that at least one agent is free to take the call hence comparatively less productive
4. Anticipatory Dialer-using the statistics generated by an agent, the system anticipates when the agent will be free for the next call. One abnormally long call by the agent will cause a chain of abandoned calls.
5. Predictive Dialer

It is the time factor which gives one technology an edge over the other. With ordinary manual dialing the average productive time per hour is just 15 to 20 minutes, while power dialing gives an average of 23 to 30 minutes. The real breakthrough has come with Predictive Dialing which gives the agents an extraordinary 40 to 57 minutes per hour.