Call Center Dialer: A need to get your customer service right
Customer Service or Customer Satisfaction. Is it just another fancy buzzword you should use in a business meeting to sound smart or is it the real deal?
Maybe a better question is: How to get customer service right for the business?
The simple answer to this complicated question is: Get the right call center dialer solution for your business
The next obvious question is : How to choose the right call center dialer solution for business?
This guide will show you how to get the right call center solution for your business.
The history of the call center is not very old. The term started to get popular in 1973 after Rockwell International patented its Galaxy Automatic Call Distributor (GACD) for a telephone booking system.
After the 1980’s call center technology development took a linear growth and the technology evolved rapidly from development of toll-free numbers and in recent years to speech recognition and natural language processing.
What is a Call Center Dialer?
A call centre dialer is an application which automates the process of outbound and inbound calls. An intelligent call center dialer solution will not only automate and ease the process of calling for call centre agents but will bring the intelligence and analytics to improve the productivity and efficiency of agents.
There are different types of dialers available based on different technologies which suit different business needs according to their size and requirements.
Types of Call Center Dialers:
- Manual Dialer
- Auto Dialer
- Preview Dialer or Power Dialer
- Predictive Dialer
- Progressive Dialer
With so many different types of call center dialer solutions on the plate, which one to choose for your business?
Let’s deep dive into each of the dialer solutions available.
Manual Dialer
A manual dialer is a dialer system where agents have to dial the numbers manually. These are the most orthodox dialers available today and are used in the companies where agents don’t have to deal with a high volume of calls.
Auto Dialers:
An auto dialer is an advanced electronic device or software that automatically dials the telephone numbers fed into it. It can also be programmed to play a pre-recorded message.
The implementation of auto dialer call center dialer solution brings down the agents downtime by almost 300% by connecting the calls only to live agents and calling all the numbers without any delay.
However, with the technology progressing there are more advanced and complex auto-dialers available.
Let’s begin with type of auto dialers available:
- Preview Dialer
- Predictive dialling
- Progressive Dialer
Preview Dialer:
What is a Preview Dialer?
Preview dialer is the basic outbound auto dialer. In the preview dialer, the list of contacts is uploaded, and the dialer selects a customer to be contacted from the list and suggests it to the agent. Now, Agent can see all the details of the customer and choose the customer to be called.
Preview dialling allows agents to be pre-informed about the contact they are calling. It helps the agents to be prepared with their sales tactics & pitch according to the information of the customer.
Advantages of Preview Dialer:
- Flexibility to get customer information in advance
- An agent can select the customer to be contacted on the basis of information
- Enhances customer experience being pre-informed about him
- Provides omnichannel customer experience
Why do Preview Dialing matter?
Remember Insurance Agents?
Insurance agents call randomly and sell whatever is priority to them. For instance they talk about car insurance even though I am looking for medical insurance. The result is a cut the call being frustrated for the time wasted.
Here, Preview dialer comes in picture.
It helps the agent in knowing my requirements before the call and thus communicates to me exactly about the service I am looking for. It delivers good customer experience and increases the chances of closing the deal as well.
Customers appreciate precise communication without their time being wasted With preview dialing, agents can be more specific about their offer and meet customer expectations.
Predictive Dialer
What is a Predictive Dialer?
This autodialer (also called robodialer) is an advanced outbound dialing system that automatically dials from the list of contact numbers uploaded in the system. After dialling, it will display the status of customer numbers on the screen, for instance customer busy, voicemail, no signal, out of reach or disconnected.
Predictive dialling doesn’t require the live agent on the line, this intelligent system will automatically route the call to the available agent when a call is connected.
What makes predictive dialers stand out from other auto dialers?
Its intelligent prediction predicts when the next agent will be free to take the next call and on the basis of this prediction dialer dials the number on the agent’s behalf. The algorithm will predict the exact time of calls and as soon as the agent finishes the call, the dialer dials another number which reduces the agent’s downtime and increases productivity & efficiency.
Advantages of Predictive Dialer:
- Agents get a steady stream of calls
- Reduce downtime
- Increases agents productivity and efficiency
Predictive dialing is best for large outbound call centers where they run regular campaigns for sales, telemarketing, market research and debt collection agencies.
Progressive Dialers:
What is Progressive Dialer?
The progressive dialer is a simple auto-dialer that runs the process of connecting agents to a live person. This call center software feature enables the autodialer to run through the company customer list until it connects to a person who is available to talk. It will also filter out the phone numbers indicating status like busy, not connected, unreachable etc.
It reduces the agent’s effort of dialing each and every number manually. The main advantage of progressive dialer is that it stops calling when no agent is available to take the call.
Progressive dialers may not give very high contact rates but when you look at call analytics, there are very less abandoned calls due to unavailability of the agent.
If you have a small or mid-sized business then progressive dialer is the best option for you. It will keep your agents on their toes and agents won’t have to keep up with the automatic dialer.
Factors to focus on while setting up the call center:
Clearly business owners love the idea of having a in house call center. And this makes sense if they have decided the type of process they will be doing and no.of agents required.
The first step is to identify the reason for setting up the call center. Get clear about the objective of setting up a call center by brainstorming on the following probable objectives of the call center.
Here goes factor #1
Understanding the reason of setting up the call center
There are many reasons for setting up the call center. According to the process in the call center, business owners should decide on a call center dialer.
Few top reasons for setting up the inbound/ outbound call center
- Sales
- Technical Support
- Upsales
- Surveys
- Voice Blast
- Insurance reminders/ Debt collection etc.
These are the top processes which are being carried out in the call center.
Suggestions for choosing call center dialer according to processes.
For instance, if you are setting up the call center for sending insurance reminders or debt collections where calls are context driven, for those type of interactions the best suited call center dialer is preview dialer where you can see the call history and other details of the customer/ lead and can talk to customer according to it.
If you are setting up the call center for surveys where high volume calls have to be made and agents don’t need to know about customers. For these types of processes predictive dialer or auto progressive dialer is the choice.
Factor #2
Number of Agents
Another factor to look at while choosing a call center dialer is the number of agents involved in the process. Once the goal for setting up the call center is clear, you can define the number of agents required. As a call center owner, you should be clear with how many agents are required for the calling process.
In case of high volume outbound calling, a predictive or progressive auto dialer is best.
Whereas, the processes where are less agents are involved and aiming maximum output then preview dialer is recommended.
Factor #3
Target Customer Persona
We all want to run successful campaigns.
If we are launching an outbound sales campaign then we need maximum closures, if its a collection campaign then we want maximum collections.
But, how
We decide that campaign is successful? There is only one judge for it i.e end goals, In case of sales campaign its customers and in case of collection campaign its collection done.
But the truth is if you don’t know what type of audience you are going to target then it is not possible to run successful campaigns.
Understanding your customers is the only thing you need to do.
For instance, if you are targeting high value prospects who require high attention then predictive dialer should not be used. In B2B businesses, where you need to contact decision makers directly, progressive dialers are the good option.
Sales calls with high value prospects should be done through preview dialer to have context driven conversation.
Conclusion
Auto Dialer systems have become the oxygen to any call center setup as these technically advanced setups help in increasing the agent’s productivity and efficiency. Service providers like *astTECS are determined to provide effective and smart auto dialing solutions to all the businesses irrespective of size so that they can improve their operational efficiency. The solution includes predictive dialer, progressive dialer and preview dialer.
Still, Confused about which autodialer to choose? Contact us for the expert suggestion or leave a comment below.
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