Progressive Dialer and Preview Dialer Software: Pricing and Dialing Modes

Progressive dialer vs predictive dialer: which one should you buy?

Buy progressive when an abandoned call costs you more than an idle minute, and predictive when the reverse is true. That is the whole decision, and it is usually settled by your list size and your headcount rather than by features.

A progressive dialer places one call for each available agent. Genesys puts it concretely: if six agents are available, the system places six calls. Because it never dials ahead of the people who are free, the pacing is honest and the math is easy to defend to a compliance officer. The cost is idle time. Every ring, every voicemail and every disconnected number is paid for out of an agent's hour.

A predictive dialer overdials on purpose. It uses handle time, after-call time, idle time and historical contact rate to guess how many calls to place so that an agent is free at the moment somebody says hello. When the guess is good, agents talk far more per hour. When it is wrong, somebody answers and there is nobody there, which is an abandoned call.

The constraint most teams miss is that prediction needs a sample. Genesys states in its documentation that it recommends at least 15 agents in a campaign using predictive mode, and 10 to 15 for power mode, because average handle time and contact rate cannot be calculated reliably on a small sample. It adds a caveat almost nobody accounts for: agents logged into two campaigns are not whole agents in either one. Twenty agents split across two campaigns behave like ten in each, which is under the recommended floor for both.

So for a team under roughly ten dialing reps, predictive is not really on the menu, whatever the pricing page says. Progressive is. If you want the pacing logic compared across every mode, the predictive dialer software page prices that side in detail, and power dialer software covers the one-call-per-rep model that sits between the two.

Does a progressive dialer eliminate abandoned calls?

No. It reduces them, and the difference matters legally. Genesys states it directly in its dialing-modes documentation: with progressive dialing the risk of call abandonment is lower, but "it is not eliminated entirely."

The mechanism is blended agents. The dialer counts an agent as available and places a call for them. Before that outbound call connects, the same agent picks up an inbound call. Now the outbound call is answered by a person with no agent to hand it to, and under the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule that is an abandoned call.

This is why the precise mode setting exists. Genesys documents that enabling precise mode lets the dialer reserve agents before it places a call, which decreases the abandonment risk, and it names the cost in the same breath: reserved agents cannot take inbound calls until the reservation is released. You are buying compliance with idle time, explicitly.

The number to hold in mind is the safe harbor. The Telemarketing Sales Rule at 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv) allows no more than 3% of calls answered by a person to be abandoned, measured over a single campaign if it runs under 30 days, or separately over each successive 30-day period. A call counts as abandoned if the person is not connected to a representative within two seconds of their completed greeting.

If your reps are outbound only and never touch an inbound queue, progressive without precise mode is close to abandonment-free in practice. If you run a blended floor, assume you are generating abandoned calls and measure them. The TCPA compliance software page covers what has to be recorded and suppressed alongside that rate.

How much does a progressive dialer cost per seat?

Between $59 and $240 a month for a single seat among vendors that publish a price at all, and the spread is about what else comes in the box rather than about the dialer.

Wavv is the cheapest published entry and the most legible, because it prices the mode itself. A Preview Line seat is $59 a month, Single Line is $99 and Multi Line is $149, all with unlimited minutes and call recordings, and all discounted by seat band: 5% from five seats, 10% from ten, 15% from twenty.

Genesys Cloud CX 1 is $75 per named user a month billed annually, and outbound campaigns are included on that entry tier rather than held back for an upgrade. That is unusually generous packaging for an enterprise platform, and it makes CX 1 the cheapest way to get all six documented dialing modes. The catch is the headcount floor described above, not the sticker.

Five9 publishes $119 for Digital and $159 for Core per seat per month in US dollars, then footnotes that prices are per concurrent user with a minimum of 50 seats. For a ten-rep outbound team the real question is not $119 versus $75, it is whether you can place an order at all.

Talkdesk lists $85, $105, $165 and $225 per user a month and packages its small-business offer for the US and Canada at 25 licences. Kixie and Orum publish no per-seat figure at all, and Orum states a nine-seat minimum above its plan.

The practical read: under ten reps, Wavv and Genesys CX 1 are the only two on this list you can actually buy without negotiating a floor. For a wider view of what entry pricing looks like across every dialing model, see auto dialer pricing.

How many calls an hour does a preview dialer make?

Wavv is the only vendor in this group that publishes the number next to the price, and it is worth quoting because it settles an argument. A Preview Line seat averages 25 to 75 calls an hour. A Single Line seat averages 75 to 150. A Multi Line seat, running up to three lines, averages 150 or more.

So preview runs at roughly a third to a half of the throughput of a single-line power seat, for $59 against $99. Do the arithmetic per dial and preview gets more expensive, not less. At the midpoints, a $59 preview seat delivers about 50 dials an hour, or 0.85 dials an hour per dollar. A $99 single-line seat delivers about 112 dials an hour, or 1.14 per dollar. The faster seat is roughly a third more efficient per dollar spent.

That is the honest case against preview dialing, and it is why the mode only earns its place on lists where the record is genuinely worth reading first: a warm inbound lead, a renewal, an account with an open opportunity, a callback on a form submission. Genesys says the same thing in its own words, describing preview as the mode campaigns typically use to reach high-value contacts, and listing its drawbacks as "least efficient dialing mode" and "risk of excessive agent idle time" when the preview timer is disabled.

It is also worth noting where vendor marketing and vendor documentation disagree. Five9's own FAQ page lists "increases number of calls agents can make" as a benefit of preview dialers. Genesys' documentation calls preview the least efficient mode it offers. Both cannot be describing the same thing, and the throughput numbers Wavv publishes side with Genesys.

If raw dials per hour is the goal, the mode you want is further up the scale. Parallel dialer software and the triple line dialer page cover what multi-line seats cost and what they do to your abandonment rate.

Preview dialer vs predictive dialer: when the slower mode makes money

Preview and predictive sit at opposite ends of the same scale, and the choice is really about what a single conversation is worth.

A predictive dialer optimizes for volume of conversations. It suits high-count, low-value lists where the next record is interchangeable with this one and the goal is to get an agent talking as many minutes per hour as possible.

A preview dialer optimizes for quality of the first ten seconds. The agent sees the record, the history, the notes and any open opportunity before the call is placed, and can skip a record that should not be called at all. Genesys documents a useful refinement here: if there are multiple numbers for a contact, the agent selects which number to call, and you can configure agent-owned records so specific accounts always reach the same rep. Neither of those is possible when an algorithm decides who gets dialed next.

The optional countdown timer is the middle ground. Genesys lets you configure a preview timer that dials automatically when it expires if the agent has not placed or skipped the call, which caps the idle cost of the mode without removing the review.

A rough rule that holds up: if the expected value of one connected conversation is more than about an hour of a rep's loaded cost, preview pays. Account management, renewals, high-ticket B2B and anything where calling the wrong contact damages the relationship all clear that bar. Cold consumer lists almost never do.

There is a third option that did not exist when these modes were named. If the reason you want preview is that the record deserves reading, an AI SDR reads every record on every call and never pays idle time for the privilege. That comparison is laid out on best dialer for cold calling.

Preview, progressive, power and predictive: the four modes in one place

Genesys documents six modes and the four that matter for outbound sales line up on a single scale from most agent control to most machine control. Reading them in order is the fastest way to work out which one you are actually shopping for.

Preview. The system presents the contact record. The agent reviews it and decides to dial or skip, then places the call manually. The agent hears all pre-connect audio and logs the outcome. Abandonment is eliminated because no call exists until a human starts it. Genesys lists the drawbacks as least efficient and prone to idle time.

Progressive. The system dials one contact per available agent and runs call analysis before matching the call to an agent. Genesys summarizes it as never dialing more contacts than agents available. Abandonment risk is minimal but real, via blended agents, and precise mode closes that gap by reserving the agent first.

Power. Here the labels diverge. Genesys defines Power as dialing multiple numbers for every idle agent, with benefits listed as more efficient than progressive and reduced idle time, and the drawback as higher abandonment risk. Much of the rest of the industry uses power dialer to mean one call per available rep, which is closer to what Genesys calls progressive. Wavv, for instance, lists Power dialer as a feature on all three seats including Preview.

Predictive. A stage-based algorithm fed by average handle time, after-call time, idle time and historical contact rate decides the pace. Most efficient, highest abandonment risk, and it needs a floor of roughly 15 agents per campaign to predict anything reliably.

The two remaining Genesys modes are worth knowing about even though they are not sales dialing. Agentless places calls without an agent and can transfer a live party to an outbound flow but not directly to a rep. External calling hands the number to a third-party desktop dialer for TCPA reasons, and Genesys is candid that it gives up call-detail tracking and recording in exchange.

If you are evaluating deployment rather than mode, the cloud based auto dialer page covers hosted versus self-hosted and who signs your calls for STIR/SHAKEN.

Which vendors publish a preview or progressive dialer price?

Two of the seven on this page, and that is the single most useful filter you can apply to a shortlist.

Wavv publishes per-seat prices for all three of its modes and prints the expected call rate beside each one. Genesys publishes four list prices in USD and states which capabilities sit on each tier, with outbound campaigns on all four. Five9 publishes two of its five tiers and quotes the rest. Talkdesk publishes four figures. Kixie publishes nothing on any of its three plans, and Orum publishes nothing but does state a nine-seat minimum.

The pattern is consistent across this category: the closer a vendor gets to enterprise contact center, the less of the price you can read, and the more of your evaluation happens on a call with a sales engineer. That is not automatically a bad deal, but it changes how you should budget. Assume any quote-only platform lands above the published alternatives, and assume there is a seat floor until someone tells you otherwise in writing.

Three questions get you the real number faster than a feature grid. First, what is the minimum number of seats you will sell, and is it named or concurrent. Five9's footnote specifies per concurrent user with a minimum of 50, which is a very different order from 50 named licences. Second, is the dialer on the tier you priced, or one above it. Third, which compliance controls are add-ons: Kixie sells Do Not Call scrubbing as a paid compliance add-on rather than including it, and scrubbing is not optional if you are dialing cold.

For teams that want the whole outbound stack priced rather than the dialer alone, outbound call center software compares fifteen platforms on the same basis.