While the inbound call center solutions which are made to process incoming calls mostly for customer service purposes are becoming more and more popular and pushing less advanced solutions, like cloud PBX systems and CRM systems with IP telephony integration out of the market (at least for the business that is looking for fast and successful scaling up and growing customer base), outbound call center solution is kind of “terra incognita” for many people, even though they can be highly beneficial for sales and lead generation purposes. Why don’t these solutions achieve the same level of recognition and fame as their “inbound” brothers? Is it because of their low efficiency or just because the business has not still recognized their benefits and advantages? Let us deal with it and explain to you why there are much more arguments in favor of outbound call center solutions.
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What is an outbound call center solution?
Outbound call center solution, as it follows from its naming, is a call center software tool that is designed to perform outbound calls, or outgoing calls in other words. Even though most people understand “outbound calling” as telemarketing, outbound calls can be beneficial for many other purposes, such as a collection of customer feedback or lead generation. Nonetheless, outbound calls are still widely used to generate cold sales, and this is also why many features of outbound call center solutions are focused on improving the average number of calls performed per day and boosting conversion rates by using different tools that help agents to convince cold prospects.
Outbound call center solution uses one significant technology that is also the most important part of it at all – auto dialer, or outbound dialer. Auto dialer is a tool that helps to automate almost all processes regarding outbound calling campaigns, excluding a conversation with a prospect only. There is no need to repeat again about the inefficiency and inadequate time losses concerning manual calling, especially when it comes to cold contact lists that can include numerous invalid phone numbers. Moreover, manual dialing is the thing that most agents really hate about their work and that is why it also harms agent experience and agent motivation and can cause such consequences as high agent turnover rate and attrition, or, what can be even worse, call avoidance and absenteeism. Are such consequences the thing you expect to get? We don’t believe in it, so that’s why outbound call center solutions exist.
How does an outbound call center solution work?
As we have already mentioned above, the outbound contact center software tool is designed to automate outbound calls. Auto dialer is a tool that needs only a few steps to be all set and start an outbound calling campaign – it requires you to download the contact list you want to process, involve agents (or even one agent in some modes), and start. That is all! As you could guess, auto dialers are different and work in dissimilar ways – there are three most popular auto dialing modes called Predictive dialer, Power dialer, and Preview dialer. All of them can run multiple outbound calling campaigns at the same time, identify and bypass invalid phone numbers (out-of-zone, busy signals, answering machines, etc.), provide you with detailed and timely reports about all campaigns, use integrated CRM system to collect or check data about prospects and use call scripts to help agents convince more prospects. But let us discuss each dialing mode more precisely.
Predictive dialer
The predictive dialer is the most advanced auto dialer ever as it uses an intelligent algorithm to perform as many outbound calls as possible in the shortest time. As you could guess, the predictive dialer is the fastest outbound dialer – its dialing speed is around 100 dials per hour which is three times faster than manual dialing on average. As with all other dialers, it indeed identifies invalid phone numbers and doesn’t link such calls to agents, but switches to the next contact from the contact list. Moreover, predictive dialing mode is called so because it can predict average call duration – it measures what is the average duration of previous calls and starts dialing when the agent is still talking to a client, but the predictive dialer does it so brilliantly that the next call will be linked to an agent exactly when the previous conversation ends. Thus, predictive dialing mode can also provide around 80% of agent occupancy which is also one of the best rates among other tools. The success rate of the Predictive dialer is around 75%, which is also the best score on the market which means you can get around a 2,5% conversion rate compared to less than 1% for all other methods of outbound calling.
Power dialer
Power dialer is another auto dialing mode that works a bit differently from the Predictive dialer – it starts dialing only when the agent is absolutely free (not involved in a conversation with a client or post-call work operations) and calls each next number from the contact list in order. Based on that, the average dialing speed of a Power dialer is around 75 dials per hour, with a success rate at least of 50% because it also strongly depends on the quality of the contact list. The success rate also depends on the purpose you use the Power dialer for – for cold bases it is less effective, while for warm bases it can show success rates of 75%. The main advantages of a Power dialer over a Predictive dialer include: it needs only one agent to be all set, and it can not cause dropped calls (it happens when a customer takes on the phone, but an agent has a delay).
Preview dialer
The preview dialer works the same as the Power dialer, but shows a customer card from the CRM system before each call. Also, an agent can decide whether to call or not to call each contact. Based on that, the Preview dialer is perfect for providing highly personalized service, and its dialing speed is around 50% with different success rates, depending on the quality of the lead base.
