If you’re going to drive growth at your outbound call center, you need the right engine. That is, you need the right dialer software: one that delivers contacts, conversions, and ROI—and will continue to do so as you add more agents to your team.

Too often, though, outbound sales and lead gen teams settle for less from their dialer. It's important to know what to look for when choosing the best contact center software for your own team.

In a separate article, we reviewed the differences between Convoso and the Five9 solution for call centers. Below, we compare the dialer technology of VICIdial vs. Convoso to see how they stack up and meet the needs of today’s outbound teams.

When contact centers shop around for the right predictive dialer, the first thing that’s going to jump out is VICIdial’s pricing—or more importantly, its absence. Advertised as a free call center solution, VICIdial’s biggest selling point is its low (or no) cost and open-source accessibility. And if your software spend is so low, you’re sure to benefit from a great ROI, right?  You'd think.

As it turns out, there’s more to VICIdial’s costs than meets the eye.

Though VICIdial appears to be one of the lowest-cost options for outbound call centers, it actually often ends up costing $100 or more per seat. That’s because while its open-source format offers customizable capabilities, you need to hire third-party consultants to assist with that development—and that’s after the initial setup costs and added maintenance costs. All told, this “free” dialer software isn’t actually all that cheap.

"VICIdial- it was dirt cheap, but it doesn't compare. You can't even put it in the same realm as Convoso.”

-Ariel Ayalon, Operational Manager, Senior Healthcare Advisors

Even if you can avoid the higher price tag, many VICIdial customers report a predictive dialer and features that leave a lot to be desired. When it comes to the dialer itself, past customers point to unreliable uptime and an inability to handle high-volume outreach as critical issues. Not only that, the dialer is reported to be slow to adjust to fluctuations in drop rates and data. Meanwhile, the VICIdial features that are supposed to support the dialer also fail to deliver fully.

Nothing kills momentum quite like hitting a lead’s voicemail. Having highly accurate answering machine detection on your side is essential to keeping agents motivated, engaged, and in rhythm.

Just ask Jesse Daniels, VP of Sales at One Health Direct, whose team has first-hand experience of the harm lackluster VICIdial answering machine detection can do to a call center’s sales floor and sales numbers.

“The answering machine detection on Five9 and VICIdial were not good. So many answering machines got through to the agents…It was very inaccurate. Our agents were spending about 70% of their day coding for answering machines. It was very, very unproductive.”

All that time spent coding for leaked voicemails is time agents could have instead been on the phone dialing customers.

Done right, call center reporting tools shed light on your entire call center, offering the insights you need to make improvements. When we surveyed current and former VICIdial customers in 2021, a whopping 69% of respondents noted the VICIdial interface and manual reporting as a significant pain point with the software.

For Tiffanie Gonzalez, owner of Top Healthcare Options, VICIdial’s reporting offerings weren’t just tough on the eyes, with their outdated user interface, they actually stood in the way of improved sales:

With VICIdial, we would have to [pull reports] manually. We had all these different sources of lead vendors and it was hard to keep track of the numbers…I ended up spending a lot of money since I couldn’t figure out which vendors the calls were coming from, and I couldn’t optimize. I just kept buying from sources that weren’t doing any good.”

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that after switching to Convoso, Top Healthcare Options grew from just 5 to 100 agents in under one year, while lowering costs and improving efficiencies.

Just after the outdated UI and poor reporting, low contact and connection rates were the next biggest concern raised in our survey of VICIdial customers. And it should come as no surprise when VICIdial doesn’t answer to one of today’s contact center’s biggest needs: caller ID reputation management.

When call blocking and flagging issues are dogging outbound call centers everywhere, your team needs a dialer equipped to respond. Because if your calls are showing up as “Spam Likely,” how can you expect your leads to answer as often as you need? Without caller ID reputation management tools to help understand which numbers are causing issues, VICIdial will leave you in the lurch, burning through more and more leads for less and less in return. That’s why half of the VICIdial customers we talked to last year cited poor DID reputation as a top concern.

When your business can't make contacts, you're in trouble. David Zamani and his team at Get Health-e reached that place after switching to VICIdial:

"[With VICIdial,] I had a problem. We had a hole in our boat, we were sinking, and we needed to fix it."

As if the lack of advanced features and performance weren't enough, VICIdial customers—25% of those we surveyed—cite regular service outages as an issue, meaning you can't even necessarily rely on the limited functionality you do have at your disposal. Facing system downtime, customers are faced with two options: a rock and a hard place. They can pay more for premium third-party support, or they can turn to VICIdial's dedicated support, which our survey respondents described as being plagued by long waits.

Once you dig just a little deeper than the “free” label on VICIdial’s surface, it’s clear that there has to be a better approach to outbound dialing out there. And when you compare VICIdial side by side with Convoso’s cloud-based contact center software, it’s clear that there’s only one #1 predictive dialer out there.

At the heart of the difference between Convoso and VICIdial is sheer performance. Where VICIdial software falls short, the Convoso dialer not only provides alternative options but excels. For starters, Convoso delivers:

• Top-notch speed to lead: Get to leads as fast as possible and close more sales with the most powerful predictive dialer out there.

• A dialer you can depend on: In addition to speed and power, you get reliability and scalability. Convoso offers minimal downtime and is built to grow along with the size of your sales team.

But with Convoso, the devil is truly in the details. Our software separates itself from competition like VICIdial with advanced features that make a difference, including:

• Robust, real-time reporting tools: Slice and dice your data with ease and understand your performance at the list level to drive comprehensive call center optimization.

• Complete caller ID reputation management: Stand up to the scale of today’s call flagging issues with a DID management suite built to match. Unlock full transparency into the health of your DIDs, and take action before flagged numbers hurt contact rates and your bottom line.

• State-of-the-art answering machine detection: Don’t just detect voicemails, do it with unmatched speed and precision. Convoso answering machine detection has been trained on billions of calls in order to deliver gold-standard accuracy of up to 97%.

• Dynamic scripting software to stay on message: Speed up agent training time and keep your team on message with easy-to-use, drag-and-drop dynamic scripting tools that help you support compliant conversations that drive sales.

Our dialer and these features are already combining to deliver more contacts, more conversions, and more growth for our customers. But with Convoso, you can rest assured that we won’t rest on our laurels. Just ask our CEO and Co-Founder, Nima Hakimi:

“We continue to innovate. We’re constantly releasing new features that will help you stay successful because in the performance marketing and lead generation space that we’re in, things are always changing. With us, you get to partner with a company that has your success at heart, and we make your goal our goal by really paying attention to what you need to be successful.”

That vision of customer relationships as a partnership guides everything we do at Convoso, and customers who have made the switch from VICIdial have taken notice:

As Tiffanie Gonzalez of Top Healthcare Options puts it:

“I always say that you’re only as good as your team. And I feel like Convoso is, in essence, a critical part of our team. You need a good dialer, you need good lead vendors. Everything together – the team, the dialer, the lead vendors – makes everything good…It’s not just customer service for Convoso. It’s more like a relationship. I talk to my CSM all the time and it’s like everyone is really on our side and it’s more personal – not just an answering machine or giving me some generic answer.”

And Melvin Merritt, Call Center Director at NextGen Leads:

“Convoso has a superior product [vs. VICIdial]. First off, from the software’s ease of use, including navigation, learning, and even the tutorial videos for management. Second, the customer friendliness – anything you need, they are there to walk you through it, apply it for you if you need, and give you an explanation on how to do it yourself...Convoso adapts to your business instead of your business adapting to it.”

These customers tested VICIdial vs. Convoso and never looked back. (As Melvin Merritt put it afterwards, “Convoso blew VICIdial away.”) And who could blame them: although VICIdial might claim to be free, there’s no competition when it comes to true value.

Convoso’s cloud-based contact center software delivers a comprehensive set of tools that you can use to take on your competition and take your business forward. Switch to Convoso and you can boost contact rates by up to 500%, dial up to 75% fewer leads, and drive unprecedented results for your team.

“When we moved to Convoso, the implementation was fantastic – the metrics changed immediately. It was literally like hitting a light switch.” - David Zamani, Managing Partner, Get Health-e

See for yourself the difference Convoso can make by testing it side-by-side against the competition. Sign up for a free demo today.