What Is a Robo Dialer? Benefits, Risks, and Proven Tactics

Not every call your team makes requires a human touch. Some calls are best automated.

Consider updates or routine reminders: They may need a hint of personalization, but they don’t require a human agent to be on the phone call to convey these messages actively. Robo dialers help automate such calls.

A robo dialer is an auto dialer that lets you reach out to contact lists at scale and convey a pre-recorded message or seek a response. It allows you to scale outbound calls while still being compliant, provided that the dialing system is configured appropriately.

What Is a Robo Dialer?

A robo dialer calls phone numbers from a list and plays a pre-recorded message when someone answers. It can tell the difference between an answering machine and a live human.

Several auto dialers allow text-to-speech personalization. You can also run press-1 campaigns to collect responses. There’s much more that robo dialers offer, for example:

• Routing calls to live agents
• Dropping audio messages if no one answers
• Providing real-time analytics and call metrics

Robo dialers provide a complete package for use cases where buyers or recipients don’t need high-touch customer engagement, such as political informational calls, phone surveys, debt collection, appointment reminders, and subscription renewal calls.

Benefits and Use Cases of Robo Dialers for Specific Teams

Below are some notable use cases and benefits of robo dialers for different institutions and organizations.

Political campaigns

A robo dialer serves the needs of political campaigns well. The crux of any political campaign involves connecting with people and, most importantly, staying connected. A robo dialer becomes an effective medium to mobilize votes with a recorded message from the candidate.

The dynamic caller ID allows campaigns to share district-specific information while letting voters share their responses. You have the flexibility to schedule calls per your time zone to stay compliant and avoid nudging voters at night.

Nonprofits and advocacy organizations

Robo dialers are a scalable way to reach people while encouraging event participation. Be it a donation reminder, these auto dialers serve them well, reminding people in a subtle way how to contribute.

Since no human caller is involved, recipients don’t feel unnecessarily pressured to donate, which might feel like a sales pitch. In any situation requiring you to reach out to many people, robocalling offers relentless support.

Health care providers

Robo dialers allow health care providers to contact patients proactively for clinic visits or follow-ups. Not every clinic or institution has a large front-desk team, so robo dialers automate these outreaches without needing a human assistant.

They are programmed to call a contact list based on the individuals’ scheduled appointment dates. These outreaches span beyond small clinics and institutions, including vaccination drives and public health alerts.

Institutions use robo dialers to enable interactive voice response routing or voicemail.

Educational institutions

Robo dialers allow educational institutions to issue emergency notifications in case of harsh weather conditions. They ensure communication reaches students or their parents on time. Such communication can also be for other critical matters, like upcoming deadlines or events in schools.

Overall, in any situation that requires institutions to reach out on a large scale, robo dialers let them perform those outreaches with minimal effort.

Sales and marketing teams

Outbound cold calling involves contacting hundreds of people in a day. These activities only require human support when you’re expected to deliver a personalized and high-touch engagement to the recipient. However, for simpler situations where you want to sprinkle personalization into a somewhat routine update, automated outreaches become more reliable.

Robo dialers cater to such situations. When you’re running a follow-up on form submission or running nurture campaigns, you need a subtle approach. Automated dialers help you reach out to many contacts. Since there are no humans involved, contacts are less likely to view these calls as human-driven spam.

Teams are free to use predictive dialing to optimize agents’ talk time and connect them only when a live person answers. Until that happens, the robo dialer keeps the recipient engaged with an automated message. You are free to iterate on this with an A/B test to increase the number of conversions you receive.

Call centers and BPOs

Call centers and BPOs leverage robo dialers to eliminate idle time. The call list is auto-dialed and segmented to personalize the message for the right target audience.

Due to this increased efficiency in call center operations, you find opportunities to optimize workflow using real-time reporting capabilities.

Proven Tactics for Effective Robo Dialing

Although robo dialers convey reasonably helpful updates, reminders, or information to recipients, they risk being perceived as spam. There’s a fine line that businesses need to draw to remain helpful rather than intrusive to the target contact list. Here are some tactics that allow you to do that while using a robo dialer:

Local presence dialing

Teams can leverage dialing software that displays the same local area code as the one in a prospect’s geographic region. This largely affects connect rates since local numbers appear to be genuine compared to calls initiated from distant geographic locations.

It builds trust by creating a local presence for your business. More customers are likely to answer such calls because they see them as being from the community.

Automated call-time optimization

It’s best to schedule outbound calls during windows of time statistically proven to have high customer availability. For example, some research indicates that 4 PM to 5 PM is a favorable time to reach out to sales prospects. However, the best time to reach out would vary from company to company.

You need to monitor success metrics in different time frames to understand what’s most favorable for you. Nextiva’s dialing software provides detailed analytics into such activities, making it easier to realize high customer engagement and connect rates during the best-suited outreach hours.

Predictive voicemail

When contacts don’t respond, dialers help a business leave pre-recorded voice messages to prompt callbacks. This allows a business to remain compliant while still reaching out based on the company’s policies and consistent standards.

A retailer in e-commerce was able to increase abandoned cart recovery from 10% to 55% just by calling their customers. Robocalls help businesses automate these outreaches at scale, and they can encourage callbacks through automated emails.

Risks and Drawbacks of Robo Dialers

Although helpful in some situations, robo dialers should be used with some caution, considering the risk of spam and compliance issues.

Association with scams

Many scammers use robocallers to impersonate banks, government agencies, or delivery services. If contacts keep reporting automated calls as spam, your caller ID reputation is at risk.

When your caller ID is tagged as spam, it affects your connect rates. Prospects lose trust in legitimate outreaches, customer engagement drops, and the caller ID reputation further degrades.

Tip: If you haven’t done so, it’s best to validate your caller ID with services like STIR/SHAKEN authentication. It’s short for:

STIR: Secure Telephone Identity Revisited

SHAKEN: Signature-Based Handling of Asserted Information Using Tokens

It helps carriers see your caller ID as genuine and not spoofed. There are several other ways to lift your caller ID reputation. See how you can avoid being flagged as spam.

Legal compliance issues

If there’s a lack of consent, robocalls struggle to prove compliance with FTC and FCC regulations. As a business, you must adhere to the Do Not Call registry and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

Beyond legal compliance, there are time zone restrictions, which are a business’s moral responsibility. In several geographies, you need consent to dial sales calls, and without proper permission, it becomes a compliance issue for a company.

Customer frustration

When your calls are poorly timed or are simply irrelevant, they increase hang-up rates and lead to drops in customer engagement. Robocalls add friction to a prospect’s journey since they come in without prior information.

Some may perceive robocalls as an imposition or a sales pitch, damaging a business’s reputation. Considering the spammy approach, this might discourage some prospective buyers from conducting business with you.

Technical pitfalls

If a robo dialer isn’t correctly configured, it might lead to inaccurate call transfers, testing a prospect’s patience in receiving required support. Some dialers might have poor voicemail audio quality or a lack of a fallback mechanism when answering machines receive these calls.

You need to configure the tech thoughtfully to remain cautious of the risks associated with a robo dialer.

Nextiva: A Smarter Approach to Robo Dialing

Although there are some risks, robocallers can be a powerful tool for reaching the masses. This is true when you use them responsibly and intelligently. Whether you run a public service campaign or manage customer appointments via robocalling, choosing the right provider is crucial, considering the compliance issues.

Nextiva delivers a robust dialing software built for compliance, scalability, and personalization. It allows businesses to automate outreach while integrating with your CRM to segment contact lists intelligently. You can record these calls and sync the latest context with your CRM, helping you assess the lead score more accurately. Nextiva delivers a call recording feature.

With Nextiva, your auto-dialing workflows improve, and the platform lets you optimize for engagement across all channels, such as voice, SMS (text messages), and email.

Get a free, live demo with Nextiva.