Managing Business Expectations

Posted on: 7 June 2019

One of the most frustrating things about call center marketing is that numerous calls will go unanswered—the line may be disconnected, the respondent may not pick up, or the call may be sent to voicemail. Multiple unanswered calls in a row can leave call center agents waiting a large amount of time between successful calls, which reduces overall call volume. Thankfully, predictive dialer platforms provide a solution to this difficulty.

Predictive dialers work by dialing multiple numbers at once. Leads that answer the call are immediately connected to an available agent. The predictive dialer continually monitors agent availability in order to avoid dialing too many numbers at once—this minimizes the number of answered calls that have no agent available to handle them. Read on for a guide about using predictive calling to create an effective marketing campaign.

1. Use an Aggressive Sales Script

The power of a predictive dialer platform lies in its ability to drastically increase the number of answered calls that your agents handle per day. Unfortunately, this does come with a cost—agents have very little wait time between calls, which means that they can't read any personal details you may have collected about a lead and come up with their own marketing angle.

Because of this, your call center marketing campaign needs to center around a broad, aggressive call script that's easy for agents to implement. Focus on quickly providing leads with details about your product or service and what benefits it can offer to the caller.

2. Collect Metrics to Refine Your Campaign

An effective predictive dialer platform will allow you to collect metrics about answered calls. This includes what time of day the calls were answered, the demographics of the respondent, and the status of the call. Because predictive dialer platforms rely on volume, the software needs to provide agents with the ability to quickly denote the outcome of the call—completed sales, requests for more information, a request to be called back, or a request to never be called again.

When you use these metrics to match successful calls to the respondent's demographic, you can refine your call center marketing campaign to focus on making calls to respondents that are more likely to result in completed sales or requests to be called back. You do this by paring down your predictive dialer's call list to the demographics that match your desired responders.

3. Choose a Cloud Predictive Dialer to Reduce Costs and Record Successful Calls

Cloud predictive dialer providers offer a number of advantages over self-hosted predictive dialers. One major advantage is that it's much less expensive—cloud platforms integrate easily with business VoIP software, allowing your call center to rely on its internet connection rather than needing to use landlines. Eliminating landlines results in lower operating costs for your call center.

Another advantage is that you can easily record and store calls on the cloud. Since cloud storage is very inexpensive, you'll be able to easily store massive amounts of calls and categorize them by their outcome. This simplifies training for new agents as you can use calls where sales where successfully completed in order to provide agents with real-life examples. This increases the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by reducing training times.

Overall, predictive dialing is a high-volume approach that drastically reduces time between calls for your call center agents. It also allows you to refine your campaign and target leads that are statistically promising based on metrics the platform has collected. If your call center wants to harness the power of this method of auto-dialing, contact a software vendor that offers predictive dialer platforms and ask if they offer cloud integration.