Think of diallers as the trusty stalwarts of the customer communication world: essential in their time for getting call centres into shape, but just as typewriters evolved to word processors, call centres have transformed into contact centres, widening their embrace far beyond the simple telephone call.

However, phone calls still play an important part in the choir of customer interactions, but they are no longer the soloists. With the chorus of digital channels growing louder, it's time to harmonise the old with the new, exploring both the competition and the collaboration between traditional diallers and burgeoning digital technologies.

Performance Differences Between Digital Messaging Channels and Diallers

Diallers have long been the staple of the collections industry, setting the tone for countless customer interactions. Yet, they demand a full band of agents to field the calls, and typically achieve a modest 3% engagement rate.

Operating Hours

Diallers are limited to the working hours of human agents, whereas automated AI chatbots over digital channels are standing ready to serve 24/7 and can connect with customers at more convenient times, including with night owls and shift workers. This flexibility is warmly welcomed and is particularly effective on platforms like WhatsApp.

Channel Limitations

Where diallers offer a solo performance over just the phone, digital channels orchestrate a full symphony of options—SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, and web chat—enhancing the richness of both inbound and outbound communnications.

Costs and Agent Retention

Maintaining a dialler is costly in terms of software, agent salaries, agent holidays and the inevitable sick days. Digital agents, however, are lower in cost and maintenance, requiring no breaks and suffer no staff turnover issues. This shift is music to the ears of contact centres tired of the constant search for new agent talent.

Productivity

In contrast to diallers, conversational AI digital agents are like a high-tech synthesizer, capable of producing a broad range of sounds with fewer musicians. Typically, one digital agent can do the work of five human agents. Digital solutions nimbly handle the repetitive choruses of customer queries, like identity verification or financial assessments, thus allowing human agents to shake off these time consuming tasks in favour of more value-added interactions that require human skills.

Personal Conversations

While diallers enable the direct, human-to-human connections that some customers still prefer, digital and AI technologies are adding breadth to these interactions. They can be designed to maintain a relational tone that guides customers in a conversational manner. The transition from AI to a human agent can be as smooth as a well-composed key change, often so seamless that customers hardly notice the switch.

Moving to digital messaging requires a composer’s touch—careful planning, thoughtful message design, and strict adherence to the rules of compliance. Digital agents, trained in the language of specific industries (AI built on a custom language model), can deliver responses naturally, even responding sensitively to life's more difficult moments, like a job loss.

Integrating Diallers and Digital Channels for Customer Engagement

Too often, diallers and digital channels perform in isolation, like instruments out of sync. Imagine each communication channel—phone, email, digital messaging—playing its part alone. Digital technology can be the conductor, bringing these disparate sounds together into a cohesive performance.

Companies that have shifted from diallers to digital messaging channels have fine-tuned their resources more effectively. Initiating customer interactions with, e.g. a QR code to WhatsApp, has guided many routine calls towards self-service in a digital channel, thus reducing reliance on traditional calls.

Webio has helped clients to create customer engagement journeys that use mulitple channels in harmony.

Examples include embedding a QR code in a letter or an email, which then leads customers to a secure live chat on WhatsApp, led by conversational AI. 

Another example is a parking fine collections company that was struggling with large volumes of inbound calls. Instead of having customers hang up the phone in frustration, they added a message to their IVR that gives customers the option to switch to WhatsApp to resolve their query via conversational AI messaging.

Conclusion

Adopting digital channels is like upgrading from acoustic to electric—amplifying your reach and resonance with the audience. With automation, agents can conduct over 300 conversations daily, striking a chord of efficiency and customer satisfaction that resonates well into the future.

Watch the webinar: How to Reduce Dialler Dependency and Have More Customer Conversations