As he recognised, a predictive dialler attempts to dial contacts in advance of agents completing their current calls. A progressive dialler waits for an agent to complete the current call before attempting to dial the next contact. As a result, it is not the predictive dialler that suffers, “higher than necessary agent ‘wait times’ and costing the operation” as the article claims. Due to its predictive nature, there will inherently be less idle agent time with a predictive dialler. Mr Cramer has this aspect of the two technologies back to front.

Progressive diallers have their place, primarily in call centres making calls to businesses where the answer rate will be close to 100%. However, when the target base is residential in which answering rates range from 20 to 30% for all lists, unless the call centre is quite small, a predictive dialler is the technology of choice.

Mr. Cramer did make one valid point, concerning dialler management. Diallers can overdial leading to abandoned calls. However, that is not an inherent attribute of predictive diallers, it results from such diallers not being properly configured and managed, and from their use with too few agents.

Reading the article a second time, it becomes apparent that Mr. Cramer isn’t so much talking about progressive diallers per se, but about outbound IVR. With IVR ports costing a fraction of a live agent, the advantage of predictive over progressive diallers evaporates when callers are connected to an IVR. The article could explicitly acknowledge this focus and be better titled “Progressive diallers better choice for outbound IVR”.