Why contact centres will stop taking your calls
Here’s a surprising fact. The latest research indicates that the global predictive dialer software market size is expected to reach USD 25.52 billion by 2030 and expand at a CAGR of 42.3% from 2025 to 2030 . This is in contrast to a decidedly modest 8.03% CAGR expansion for the general call centre market over the same period.
How can this be? After all, most industry experts have concluded some time ago that outbound calling in general and predictive dialling in particular are heading towards the dustbin of history. The idea that a human agent would actually call someone seemed until very recently to belong to a bygone age. Their attention captivated by the compelling world of AI, what the experts have omitted to notice is the enduring persistence of three fundamental trends.
Firstly, customers still want to speak to humans. Not everything can be resolved by even the cleverest bot or AI agent. Empathy and emotional intelligence are still some way off the horizon in the world of quasi-human voice bots such as Siri, Alexa or Cortana as charmingly named as they may be.
Secondly, in the third decade of the 21st century customers will baulk at the idea of waiting patiently in a queue listening to muzak while being patronised by inane looping recorded messages. In the TikTok age, attention spans are shorter than ever.
Finally, inbound voice traffic is notoriously difficult to predict, even when advanced and expensive workforce management tools are in use. Most organisations have now realised this, and incoming traffic is increasingly being deflected to digital channels. Chat bots,
WhatsApp, SMS or even good old email are widely promoted whilst telephone numbers are being relegated to the small print on the back pages of the website. Moreover, a large proportion of inbound voice traffic has been outsourced to cheaper offshore locations such as South Africa, Philippines or India.
As a result, contacting businesses by telephone has become increasingly frustrating with ever longer wait times and poorly trained agents passing callers from pillar to post. So, is there anything that may be done to reconcile these persistent trends with the unstoppable forward march of the AI revolution and the increasing dominance of digital channels.
One answer seems to arise from the repurposing of outbound technologies and predictive diallers in particular. The important thing to note here is that outbound is inherently controllable. This means that contact centres can regulate the volumes of outreach according to staffing levels and therefore ‘flatten’ the peaks and troughs associated with inbound call traffic.
Of course, predictive diallers were originally invented in order to streamline telemarketing campaigns and cold calling in particular using vast untargeted data sets. The world has fundamentally changed since those heady days and the practice of cold calling has all but disappeared. Today, less than 10% of all outbound calls made by contact centres are cold calls. The other +90% are made in response to some form of contact or interest initiated by the customer, typically online.
The interesting thing about all this is that as inbound call traffic is largely being deflected to digital channels and AI, perhaps paradoxically, the use of outbound calling and predictive dialling is growing rapidly. The reason for this shift is easy to explain. As customers are encouraged to interact with businesses through AI assistants and chat bots, they are empowered to choose if and when they wish to speak to a real-life agent. They can do this at a time convenient to them, without having to waste their lives listening to muzak.
So, in a surprising way, outbound dialling is replacing inbound as a way of triaging and filtering live calls so that only such matters that cannot be handled by AI reach live agents. Not only that, but this approach ensures that the customer will speak to the right agent from the start, not wasting their time being passed like a football from one department to another. This not only improves customer experience but also reduces waste in the contact centre.
Finally, replacing inbound calls with outbound may put an end to the perennially annoying and at times circular IVR menus. By the time an agent calls a customer, they will know in some detail the nature of their enquiry and be the right person to hold an informed conversation leading to a quick and satisfactory resolution.
To conclude, the analysts’ latest predictions forecasting the rapid rise of outbound calling and predictive dialling have a solid grounding in reality. The tables have turned. No longer is the customer the one who has to take the initiative to contact a business, it is the business who will be tasked with contacting each customer at the customer’s chosen time, proffering the right message.
Looking into the future, it is not too much to expect AI to anticipate what customers and prospects may need even before they are able to articulate it themselves. This may lead to even higher use of outbound calling and predictive diallers.
Sometimes, technologies invented to serve one specific purpose can be applied in new and surprising areas to much greater effect. Outbound diallers are a case in point. A technology regarded in the past as a source of annoyance is being rediscovered and repurposed to become the very thing that is required to radically enhance customer experience in a way that is relevant to the times we live in.
Editorial contact
Danny Singer
Founder & Chief Product Officer
