What Is a Dialer and a Dialing Campaign?

What is a dialer, in plain terms

Imagine you need to tell 800 parents that the meeting has been postponed by a day. You could seat three people with a list and have them dial for two days. Or you could record a twenty-second message, upload the list, and press "Start." That is a dialer: a system that does the dialing for you, number after number, and sometimes many numbers at once.

The English term is Dialer or Auto Dialer. In the call-center world there are a few methods: a dialer that only plays a message; a dialer that dials and connects to an agent only the people who answered (so the agent doesn't waste time on ringing and voicemail); and a dialer that dials at a pace matched to the number of available agents. What they all share: the machine does the grunt work, and people only handle the calls that actually happened.

A dialing campaign is one run of the dialer, with a defined goal: a list of destinations, what happens when someone answers, when to start, and what to do with those who didn't answer.

How a campaign works, step by step

1. Destination list — you upload a file or a list of phone numbers. It's worth cleaning it first: duplicate numbers, missing numbers, dropped digits.
2. What they hear — a recorded message (in your voice, or a file you prepared), or a direct connection to an available agent.
3. When — start immediately, or schedule ahead for a specific time.
4. Dialing — the system goes through the list and dials.
5. Whoever answered — hears the message, or is connected to an agent.
6. Whoever didn't answer or was busy — in many systems gets a retry after a while, according to the number of attempts you set.
7. Tracking — how many were dialed, how many answered, how many are left.

The point most people miss is step 6. A campaign with only one attempt usually reaches just part of the list — people at work, on the road, at prayer. Another attempt an hour or two later significantly raises the number of people who actually receive the message.

What campaigns are used for

• Reminders — a doctor's appointment, a parents' meeting, a payment due date, "Zman starts tomorrow."
• Fundraising — reaching out to donors before a fundraising day, with a connection to an agent for anyone who wants to donate right now.
• Event invitation — a simcha, a conference, a class, a fundraising evening. A short message with the date, time and place.
• Survey — a short question by phone, or a connection to an agent who conducts the survey.
• Urgent update — a cancellation, a change of location, a closure due to weather. Here the dialer saves the most valuable thing: time.
• Following up with customers — a list of people who called and weren't answered, or who left an inquiry on the website.

A yeshiva, for example, can send all the parents a message about a change in the Bein Hazmanim schedule. A nonprofit can dial all of last year's donors the evening before a campaign, and connect to the call center anyone who presses "1" or answers. A store can remind customers that their order is waiting for pickup.

A recorded message or a connection to an agent

A few rules for a good message: say who is speaking in the first sentence, give the important information (date, time, place) early, repeat it once at the end, and don't go over half a minute. People hang up on a long message halfway through.

Scheduling ahead: the system works for you

Did you finish setting up the campaign late at night, with the list sorted and the recording ready? There's no reason to stay up until morning to press "Start," and certainly no reason to start at 11:30 PM and wake up everyone on the list. Schedule the campaign for nine in the morning, go to sleep, and the system does the work for you.

Scheduling is also useful when you want to hit the right moment: a reminder for an evening event that goes out at noon, a message to donors that goes out exactly when the campaign opens, or an update that goes out Sunday morning after being prepared on Thursday. And whoever prepares everything before Shabbat doesn't have to think about it on Motzei Shabbat.

Rules and good conduct

• Reasonable hours — not early in the morning, not late at night, not while everyone is at prayer or at a meal. How the public regards you depends on this more than on the content of the message.
• Consent — dial only people who are in touch with you and haven't asked you to stop. In Israel, the law has rules on promotional mailings, including by phone; before a marketing campaign, check what applies to you.
• Clear identification — dial from a number that people can recognize and call back, and say in the message who you are.
• Opt-out — anyone who asks not to be called is taken off the list. Really.
• Don't overdo it — a campaign every week to the same list will wear out people's attention.

Common mistakes

• A list that isn't clean — duplicate numbers will receive the message twice, and people remember that.
• A poor-quality recording — a recording from a cell phone in an echoing room sounds unprofessional. A quiet room and a close microphone make a difference.
• Connecting to an agent with no agents — if more calls go out than the agents can take, those who answered hear silence. Adjust the pace.
• Forgetting to test — send it to yourself and to two team members' numbers first, and hear how it actually sounds.

Campaign planning sheet: seven questions before you press "Start"

A good campaign is written on paper before it goes into the system. These are the questions we go through with every customer, and you can fill them in yourself in ten minutes:

Sample message script (about 20 seconds): "Hello, this is Yeshiva name of the yeshiva. The first-grade parents' meeting has moved from Monday to Wednesday, the 12th of Kislev, at eight in the evening, in the yeshiva hall. Again: Wednesday, eight in the evening. For details, call the yeshiva office. Thank you, and goodbye." It says who is speaking in the first sentence, gives the information twice, and ends with a number to call back.

Dialing hours: the public you are calling has a daily routine, and it's best to dial within it and not against it. In a community with fixed prayer times, late morning and early evening (after Mincha-Maariv) are usually the best hours; early afternoon is less good. For businesses — working hours, and not in the first minutes of the morning. And always make sure the campaign doesn't "spill over" into Shabbat or Yom Tov: a campaign that started late with retry attempts needs a clear end time.

Three campaigns from the field

1. A reminder to yeshiva parents

A yeshiva with a dormitory, 320 students, needs to tell the parents that the buses at the end of the zman leave on Wednesday afternoon and not on Thursday. The secretary finishes sorting the parent list — one number per family, with no duplicates between father and mother — at 11:40 PM on Sunday night. The Rosh Yeshiva's recording, 25 seconds, has been ready since noon. He doesn't press "Start." He sets a start time of 10:15 the next day, closes the computer, and goes to sleep. At 10:15 the system starts dialing; those who didn't answer get another attempt in the afternoon. When the secretary opens the screen at three, he sees how many families heard the message and how many are left — and to those he sends a short SMS. No parent was woken at night, and no one sat for a whole day with a list and a pencil.

2. A nonprofit fundraising evening

A nonprofit holds a fundraising evening with a volunteer call center that opens at 8:00 PM. It has 2,400 donors from last year. Instead of waiting for them to call, at 7:30 PM it launches a campaign with a message from the nonprofit's chairman: "Tonight we open the annual charity campaign. To donate right now, press 1, and an agent will answer you." Anyone who presses 1 goes to the volunteers' queue; some of them sit in the hall and some are at home with a temporary extension. Pace matters here: if the message goes out to 200 people at once and 40 of them press 1, the queue fills up all at once. So you run the list in batches — a few hundred every half hour — and watch the queue board: when the number waiting drops, you release the next batch. After midnight you stop, and those who didn't answer are saved for a "last reminder" campaign the next morning.

3. Appointment reminders for a business

A vehicle testing center loses dozens of appointments every week that people simply forgot. The solution: every day at 4:00 PM a short campaign goes out to everyone who has an appointment the next day — the list is exported from the center's appointment calendar, and the message is: "Hello, this is the testing center. Reminder: you have an appointment tomorrow. To confirm, press 1; to cancel or change, press 2 and you'll be transferred to the office." Whoever pressed 2 goes to an agent who frees the slot for someone else. The campaign is small — 60 to 80 numbers a day — but it runs every day at the same time, so it's set up once and only the list changes. After a month you can compare in the appointment calendar how many no-shows there were before and after. This is the campaign that is easy to measure, because its result is a chair that doesn't stay empty.

What the three campaigns have in common: a message under half a minute, a start time chosen for the audience, and one clear measure. What's different: at the yeshiva there is no agent at all, at the nonprofit the agent is the heart of it, and at the testing center the agent only handles those who asked for a change.

What to do when something goes wrong

A campaign is a simple machine, so its problems repeat themselves too. This table solves most of them:

And one rule before everything else: test on three team numbers, exactly as the real list will receive it. Most of the problems in the table show up in this test, which takes two minutes.

More mistakes seen in the field

• Asking people to write something down — "The address is Street…" is said once and forgotten. Send details meant for writing down by SMS as well.
• A message that doesn't say what to do — "The meeting was postponed" without saying "to when" generates a hundred calls to the office.
• Dialing the whole list the first time — run a new campaign first on a hundred numbers, listen to the feedback, and only then to everyone.
• Forgetting those who didn't answer — the report shows them; the "didn't answer" list is the next campaign, or the next SMS.
• The sending number is the same, and no one answers it — people call back the number that called them. Make sure the number is routed to the office or to a message, and not to a busy tone.
• Not setting an end time — retry attempts that continue into the night do more damage than the whole message.

Rules of thumb worth knowing

A few general numbers, from industry experience and not a promise: a good message lasts 20 to 30 seconds; beyond a minute, the rate of listening to the end drops. In a first dialing round, at a reasonable hour, usually between half and two thirds of the list answer; a second and third attempt raise the coverage significantly, and beyond three attempts the benefit is small and the annoyance grows. In a campaign with "Press 1" for an agent, the percentage who press varies greatly by audience — for longtime donors on a campaign evening it is high, for a cold list it is low — so you plan the number of agents based on a small first batch, and only then expand.