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If your contact center team makes large volumes of outbound contact, you might use an auto dialer to improve efficiency and consistency.

There are many different types of outbound dialers that are commonly used, and with advancements in AI, new agentless dialing modes are becoming increasingly common.

In this guide, we’ve outlined the five main types of outbound dialers commonly used in contact centers, and explained the differences between them.

Before we begin, if you’re looking to make outbound contact at scale, contactSPACE technology can help you spend more time talking to customers and achieve better results.

We have a full-stack outbound solution available, ready to deploy on its own, as well as plugins and APIs for Twilio, Amazon Connect, and other contact center solutions.

Contents

• Outbound dialer types
• Comparison table
• Which dialing mode should you use?
• Other considerations for making effective outbound contact

Outbound dialer types

Power dialer

The term power dialer typically refers to a type of auto dialer that calls numbers from a list, in order, without offering extra assistance to the agent.

Once a call is placed, dialing begins just like a normal phone call. If the line is busy or the call reaches a voicemail inbox, the agent will normally have to handle this and log the outcome manually.

Then, once the call is disconnected, the power dialer calls the next record automatically, beginning the process again.

Power dialing is relatively unsophisticated. In most contact centers, other dialer types are used instead, to help agents stay on-message on the call and to help improve dialing efficiency.

Preview dialer

Preview dialing is generally the most methodical outbound dialing mode.

Using a preview dialer, before the call is placed, the record appears on the agent’s screen – on their CallGuide, if using the contactSPACE user interfaces module – showing information about the customer, their purchase history, and other details for the agent to digest.

The agent can then decide when to place the call, once they’re ready to make contact.

When using contactSPACE CallGuides, for example, the agent clicks the green button to begin dialing.

When the line is busy or the call reaches voicemail, the outcome can be logged automatically.

On the other hand, for other outcomes, the agent can easily click the associated button on their CallGuide interface to wrap up the call and move on to the next record.

Preview dialing can be a good choice if you want your agents to absorb as much information about the customer as possible before placing the call. Think enterprise account management, B2B sales, high-value renewals, or retention of at-risk customers.

For example, as a university alumni engagement team, you might have donors who have an extensive history with your organization, as well as different interests, such as their majors, events they’ve attended, and so on.

In this case, it might make sense to use preview dialing so that your callers have enough time to learn about the donor before placing the call, helping to maximize engagement.

The downside is volume: using preview dialing, you’re generally limited to about 10–25 calls per agent per hour, so it’s only economical when the value of each conversation justifies the preparation time.

Progressive dialer

Progressive dialing is almost the exact same as preview dialing, with one small difference.

Using a progressive dialer, agents still get to preview the record before the call, and learn about the specific customer they’re contacting.

However, rather than being able to place the call when they choose, the call is placed automatically after a set delay – typically five to 20 seconds.

This allows your agents to personalize their messaging for each call that they make, while still maintaining efficiency when outbound dialing.

Progressive dialing can be a good fit for mid-market B2B sales, customer retention campaigns, collections, and regulated industries like financial services and healthcare.

Continuing with our donor engagement example, progressive dialing might make more sense for a charity, as opposed to a university.

For some non-profits, on re-engagement campaigns, you might have certain donors who have an extensive donation history, as well as different interests you might like to speak with them about, such as causes they’ve supported.

However, compared to a university, each donor might not have quite the same level of interaction history or connection to your organization, so the agent might not need to spend as long preparing for the call.

Also, as a nonprofit, you might have a much higher number of donors to speak with compared to a university, meaning it’s important to maintain efficiency when making outbound contact. Because of this, choosing progressive dialing can sometimes make sense.

Predictive dialer

Predictive dialing works quite differently from preview or progressive dialing.

Rather than allocating records to agents before the call, the predictive dialer makes calls in the background before they’re assigned to agents.

Multiple calls are made simultaneously – typically two to four per agent. When a call is answered, it’s connected to a team member.

The number of calls made by the dialer depends on the number of agents available to speak, as well as the answer rates of calls being made at any given moment.

When the predictive dialer encounters a voicemail inbox or a busy line, it handles this automatically, so agents don’t have to.

Using predictive dialing, agents don’t get to preview the record before speaking with a contact. The customer’s details are only displayed once the call is connected.

As a result, predictive dialing can be very efficient. However, this dialing mode requires that the contact center team have a certain minimum number of agents – normally at least 10-15 – to ensure there are enough people available for customers to speak to given the volumes of calls being placed.

Predictive dialing can also introduce compliance considerations in many jurisdictions.

Sometimes, when a predictive call is answered, there might not be an agent available to speak, so your customer will have no one to talk to.

This is called abandonment, and is controlled by communications regulators in most jurisdictions, such as the FCC in the United States and Ofcom in the UK.

Often, there are limits to the proportion of calls you can abandon, and policies you must follow when abandonment occurs.

To help manage these compliance requirements, contactSPACE comes with inbuilt compliance controls, allowing you to precisely manage your contact strategy and ensure abandonment remains below allowable levels.

Predictive dialing normally makes the most sense when working with large amounts of data, with relatively few personal details available pertaining to each record.

For example, as a large mortgage business, you might get hundreds of leads per minute coming in through your website.

In this case, you might want to prioritize making contact quickly while the lead is fresh. Also, you might not have many details available about each contact for your agents to absorb, so predictive dialing might make sense to use.

Agentless AI dialing

With recent advancements in AI technology, many contactSPACE customers are taking increasing advantage of agentless dialing to handle certain types of outbound interactions.

Using this dialing mode, calls are usually made predictively, but when a customer answers, they are connected to a virtual agent as opposed to a human agent.

The virtual agent can help the customer perform different actions based on how the call progresses, similar to a traditional IVR workflow, including routing the call to a live agent if desired.

Generative AI voice can also be used to help improve the quality of the interaction, and the messaging of the virtual agent can be personalized to a certain extent based on the specific customer being contacted.

Many contactSPACE customers use agentless dialing for things such as performing surveys, and reminding customers of upcoming appointments.

Similar to predictive dialing, agentless calling can lead to increased compliance considerations due to robocalling legislation in certain jurisdictions.

For example, in the US, TCPA rules restrict the types of calls that can be made without human involvement, including using AI-generated voice. Often, prior express written consent is required to be able to make this type of outbound contact to customers in the United States.

Comparison table

Which dialing mode should you use?

For some outbound contact center teams, using preview or progressive dialing can help you achieve the best results, depending on the nature of the calls you’re making.

We’ve found that some of our customers have actually noticed performance improvements by switching from predictive to progressive dialing, combined with other contactSPACE Intelligent Outbound functionality, such as autowrap, call-time optimization, and record prioritization.

Preview or progressive dialing can help you make better quality contact, spend more time talking to customers, and reduce compliance risk.

However, predictive dialing is often still the best choice when you have very large volumes of outbound calls to make, especially if you have enough agents available to avoid abandoning too many calls.

Increasingly, many contactSPACE customers are also beginning to use agentless predictive dialing to fully automate certain types of outbound interactions, significantly increasing outbound dialing efficiency.

Other considerations for making effective outbound contact

To make effective outbound contact, it’s not just the dialing mode that you have to consider.

The dialer you choose is just one piece of your contact strategy puzzle.

How will you prioritize who to contact?

Think about who is most likely to convert, in order to maximize performance. Using contactSPACE, you can design intelligent contact strategies to get the most from your available data, prioritizing records depending on their likelihood of converting.

How else will you maximize efficiency in the agent workflow?

Using contactSPACE CallGuides, agents have intuitive, easy-to-use buttons and shortcuts available to instantly log outcomes and move on to the next call. You can also use contactSPACE productivity enhancements such as autowrap to reduce handling time, which is especially important when using preview or progressive dialing.

When will you make contact with each person?

Using contactSPACE, you can use call-time optimization to reach people when they’re most likely to answer the phone, such as after they finish work.

If you’re looking to make better outbound contact, no matter whether you’re using Twilio, Amazon, or any other communications platform, get in touch with us today to learn more about our outbound contact technology.