Busy. No answer. Disconnected. Your call center agents routinely reach these roadblocks hundreds of times a day. You know an automated dialing platform would increase productivity greatly, but you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars or wait for hardware installations. Looks like you’re stuck with dialing by hand.
Or not.
With the widespread adoption of cloud technology, powerful hosted automatic dialing solutions have become a reality. And they are more affordable then ever, with pay as you go models friendly to smaller businesses.
Defining Automatic Dialing
Automatic dialers automatically call a predefined list of leads, contacts, or customers and connect them to your agents. Automatic dialers can also play a prerecorded message or ask the customer to make a choice. When a dialer reaches a busy signal, answering machine, disconnected number, or an unanswered phone, it automatically disconnects and moves to the next person on the list.
One Dialer, Many Uses
Your contact center can use automatic dialers in many different ways. You can give customers status updates about service outages, keep them informed of relevant new deals, announce upgrades, apologize for service interruptions, installation progress, support resolution updates, reminders, etc.
Outbound dialing also benefits from automatic dialer technology. Your sales team can connect to more leads, your marketing team can automatically call people to conduct surveys, or you can deliver marketing messages. Your business can also benefit by giving time sensitive calls en masse, such as birthday congratulations or wedding anniversaries.
Predictive Algorithms, Advanced Analytics, and List Management–Oh My!
Today’s automatic dialers contain many powerful features. Here are some you want to look out for:
- Campaign/list management – The automatic dialer software should include tools to manage multiple calling campaigns, filter contact lists, and customize dialing parameters. This makes it easy to create and maintain effective purpose-based calling campaigns.
- Reports and analytics – You need advanced reporting and analytical capabilities in order to judge your return on investment and dialing campaign effectiveness. Are callers listening to your message or are they hanging up? Can you break down and segment call connection rates by customer types?
- Intelligent call pacing – Ensure the software contains an intelligent algorithm to predict when to call in order to maximize agent connection rates. If your automatic dialers reach more live leads than agents to handle them, the calls will be dropped. Predictive algorithms prevent dropped calls by optimizing the live calls to match the number of agents available.
Be aware that the FCC mandates less than 3% of total calls connected may be dropped. Also ensure compliance with federal do-not-call lists.
Modern virtual call center software usually includes automatic dialer software. Many companies also distribute their automatic dialers as a separate module. Conduct vendor research to find the best solution for you. Automatic dialing has the potential to increase your agent productivity greatly. Solutions are more accessible than ever with hosted technology.