Impress your friends: tell the difference between a PBX and a dialer
Both are phone systems. A dialer is for teams of people who are on the phone all the time. Such people are usually called tele-agents. A PBX is for people who need to do other things apart from dealing with calls. Accordingly the following differences emerge:
Table: Differences between a dialer and a PBX
| Dialer | PBX | |
| Handling incoming calls | A dialer presumes user is available all the time usually with a headset, unless on another call. Accordingly when an incoming call comes, the user hears a beep on the headset or a notice on the screen and the call is automatically connected. | A PBX presumes the user could be doing other things and rings a handset to alert the user. |
| Internal calls | Calling between agents is not an important part of the feature set of a dialer. | Calling between users is an important or the most important function of a PBX |
| Presence (availability information) | A corollary of the above is that presence is important, hence handled by the user specifically logging in. | Presence is handled indirectly or not at all. |
| Making manual calls by dialing | Not setup to do this efficiently | This is default mode in a PBX |
| Making calls by clicking on a list | Dialers come with the ability to upload a list of numbers to efficiently dial sequentially | A PBX needs to be integrated with a CRM system into which the list of numbers may be loaded |
| Team dialing (automatic / predictive) | Dialers can dial a single list on behalf of a team of callers, and distribute calls that answer to the team | A PBX is not setup to do this efficiently |
| User Productivity | Is a huge focus area, often accomplished by limiting user functionality | A PBX focuses on features more than productivity |
| MIS and reporting | Robust reporting that emphasises agent productivity | Reporting that focus on measures such as call cost. |
| Resources and cost | Costs much more per user than a PBX. Resource hog | The opposite |
Both a PBX and a dialer can be integrated with a CRM!
A dialer comes with a basic crm of its own, useful for just telephony interaction, that too over short periods of time. If a relationship has to be tracked over weeks or over other forms of communication such as email or sms, then it is best to integrate a CRM such as vTiger with the dialer. The way this usually works is that low quality leads are uploaded into the dialer since it is designed to handle large volume lists. High quality leads (such as web inquiries) should be loaded into the CRM. If a lead on the dialer becomes high quality due to interest shown, or needs to be called after a period greater than a few days, that lead is transferred into the CRM by clicking a button on the dialer.
In the case of a PBX, a CRM can be integrated to track interaction with customers over the phone along with other forms of communication. It also allows click to dial from the lead /contact page of the CRM
WarmConnect offers vTiger CRM integrated with its dialer or its PBX as well as a 3 way integration of CRM with both the dialer and the PBX.
PBX – cum - Dialers
There is often an overlap between PBXes and Dialers, and some products claim to do both. In our humble opinion, that leads them to do neither very well. WarmConnect is of course not one of them and offers a PBX and a dialer as separate products. You can subscribe to both of them, but they will not run on the same servers, leaving us with the happy task of collecting separate charges for each.