Edgar landivar 
The call centers they are popular today. They are the types of sometimes annoying calls, that call us to offer us promotions, to charge us from the bank or to remind us of the benefits of our health insurance. But they are also those nice guys, who take calls from us, like when we call the pharmacy or the vehicle insurance auto assistance. Viewed from the point of view of the telemarketer, the first type is called outgoing traffic and the second type is called incoming traffic.
The point is that for outgoing traffic the agent does not usually dial any number manually. Everything is done by a robot or a specialized software for call centers or call centers, sometimes also called in English Soft Dialers or Call Automation Software.
But marking is not entirely an easy task. You can simply dial one number after another, removing the contacts from a previously established list; but this is not optimal. Why?
The answer is that there is a long wait between the number being dialed and the subscriber answering. That time seems short, but when we talk about tens of thousands of calls and hundreds of agents on the phone, it turns out that it is inefficient and a lot of money is spent waiting. In large call centers this can mean hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. That's right, that's the reality.
Preditive marker to the rescue
A predictive dialing then, it is nothing more than an algorithm that is in charge of connecting the agent with the subscriber (or user) just at the moment the subscriber answers, causing the agent to lose little or no time waiting.
But achieving this is not easy. The algorithm has to dial each phone number and predict in what time the call will be answered. Hence its predictive name.
But it is not the only thing you have to predict, you also have to predict when an agent will be available to answer a call in progress, and there things start to get complicated. There is also another problem. Since the predictions cannot be 100% exact, there are always calls that are answered earlier than predicted and there are no agents to answer them, then the algorithm will play music waiting for the user to entertain him, but sometimes this strategy does not work and the user is upset and hangs up. The problem is that there are regulations in many countries that determine the maximum rate of users who hang up before being contacted by an agent, in many cases the number of users cannot exceed 2% or 3% of the total, because more than that means that there are many users who are being bothered by unsolicited calls. Something like SPAM.
Imagine a political campaign for the president of a country and millions of calls are generated. It is logical to think that there is a group of supporters of the political figure who will be pleased to receive the call, but most likely, the majority will be angry. These types of political campaigns are very lucrative for call centers, but very complex to handle due to the issue of regulations and possible annoying users, which at the end of the day could have a negative effect on the popularity of the character.
In addition to all of the above, a predictive dialer has to do additional work, because even if a call has been answered, this does not mean that it is a real person, it can be an answering machine or a fax machine. So, to save the agent time, you will avoid transferring these types of calls to them.
Complex right?
Progressive scoreboard
A progressive marker is very true to its name. It simply dials one call after another without making any predictions of when the user will answer. It is fine for small call centers, where there is not a high volume of calls and efficiency is not a critical issue. Many companies have given trade names to this feature to make it look more attractive, such as the name of Power Dialer, but it is only a progressive marker.
References:
