Predictive dialer technology brings a slew of advantages: it ramps up sales, trims costs, and scales easily. If your call center is all about outbound sales or lead generation, adopting a predictive dialer is a must. Unlike old-school dialers bombarding people with robocalls, this tech connects live calls to real agents intelligently, ensuring high contact rates and minimal agent downtime.
But that’s not the only benefit of using a predictive dialer. Below, we’ll dive into the top 5 ways it can improve your call center operations, and how the best solutions are differentiating themselves from the pack.
- Enhanced Efficiency Drives Sales Success
Hitting sales targets is the number-one priority for all call center representatives and managers. But when you’re using out-of-date technology, meeting those quotas is almost impossible. Dialing speeds and lines are capped, and when agents are looking at call sheets and keying in sequences by hand, the odds of making a mistake — whether punching the wrong number or calling the same customer twice — skyrocket.
Therefore, it almost goes without saying that the greatest value-adds of a predictive dialer are speed, volume, and accuracy.
- With the power of automation on their side, agents can concentrate on having conversations with customers rather than listening to busy signals and voicemails.
- Since many people prefer to communicate by text and tend to disregard unknown numbers, placing multiple calls simultaneously is the best and only way to keep contact rates high.
- Machines can’t replace people — any business that’s tried to boost sales with robocalls knows this — but they can eliminate costly errors that harm the agent and customer experience.
So what sets the top predictive dialers apart? The ability to support a large number of calls per agent is key — because it’s better to have the option of too many lines than too few. Beyond that, look for a solution that allows for customization, including call ratios, workflows, abandonment thresholds, and priority rules for leads and dialing lists. The more nuanced controls you can provide for management, the better.
Advanced predictive dialers have been shown to triple connect rates for agents, and improve sales and telemarketing conversions by as much as 300%.
Better still, there are comprehensive call center tools that include intelligent automatic call distribution (ACD) systems, so that the same team of reps can operate both outbound and inbound sales. If you truly want to boost your call center productivity and maximize agent talk time, implement a dialer built for this blended inbound-outbound model.
- Elevated Customer Service for Better Leads
Whether you want blended inbound and outbound channels or not, predictive dialer technology can do wonders for customer service, satisfaction, and conversions. That’s because the best predictive dialer solutions are software-based rather than hardware-based, meaning they can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to improve lead targeting.
With lead data and status added directly into the CRM system, as well as customizable priorities and queues for your calls, you can connect the right agents with the right customers at the right time. But there are additional features on the market that can take this a step further:
- Some CRM integrations can automatically embed up-to-date lead data within dynamic scripts, so that agents can have confidence they’re sharing the most recent and relevant information.
- When making nonstop outbound calls, there’s no time for manual logging; that should be automated by your solution, delivering detailed metrics and stats for agents, campaigns, and more.
- Customers are more likely to respond positively to calls from local numbers, meaning that caller-ID proximity matching is a small but impactful value-add that your predictive dialer should include.
All of these factors help you personalize your calls, improving the quality of the conversations you have. Some call center technologies not only let managers record calls, but monitor agents in real time and join conversations in progress. This also leads to better customer service, and helps your organization create a culture of coaching.
- Drastically Reduce Operational Costs
Legacy infrastructure, landlines, and a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system can be costly to maintain. Not to mention, scheduling lacks structure and cohesion. With legislation surrounding contact rates, the only way to reach a sufficient number of customers is by hiring more sales reps — which few call centers can afford. Predictive dialers, especially cloud-based ones, significantly reduce overhead by boosting efficiency and minimizing manual errors and downtime.
With that in mind, the best call center improvement you can make is switching to a predictive dialer that’s cloud-based. As mentioned before, it significantly boosts efficiency, which means it also significantly reduces costs. And we all know that less manual entry, less human error, and less downtime leads to more savings. The overhead costs of maintaining legacy, on-premises hardware are simply too high, especially when there are such effective software-based alternatives.
Another benefit that can’t be overstated is compliance. One of the largest costs a business can incur is a fine when a call center inadvertently breaks consumer protection rules. An automated predictive dialer tool lets you cross-reference do-not-call (DNC) lists and add custom filters that keep you in step with complex and changing regulations.
- Seamless Scalability with a Predictive Dialer
It’s impossible to mention cloud computing without talking about scalability. Across all industries, organizations are migrating their data to cloud-native platforms, allowing them the agility and flexibility to adjust operations based on their objectives, capabilities, and resources. This is critical for call centers, which frequently need to increase or decrease agent capacity on short notice.
Just as important is the ability to streamline processes. Having a complete call center technology stack — including both a web-based predictive dialer and a built-in CRM — means your agents and managers no longer have to navigate across multiple tools, platforms, and systems.
On that note: when investing in a call center solution, choose one that comes ready to deploy, with no downloads or integrations required. The whole purpose of a predictive dialer is to reduce complexity, and that means you shouldn’t be implementing new infrastructure that you’ll need an IT team to manage down the road.
- Empowering Agents to Work from Anywhere
In case you need another reason to consider moving to the cloud, look no further than the dramatic shift in favor of remote work. Distributed workforces are here to stay, and like all businesses, call centers need to be able to function remotely. A cloud-based predictive dialer and CRM empowers your agents to stay connected — and productive — from any location.
Bear in mind that the predictive dialers making the biggest impact for telemarketers are those with VoIP and a webphone (sometimes referred to as a softphone), so that agents can place calls anytime, anywhere, with no extra costs or downloads. In fact, they technically don’t even need landlines or cell phones.
A strong call center improvement strategy starts with adopting a technology stack that checks all the boxes. That’s exactly what Readymode delivers. It not only enables your sales teams with a best-in-class, all-in-one solution that includes a predictive dialer, ACD, and a CRM, but also ensures top-of-the-line engagement opportunities and experiences for your customers and leads.
Even better, you’re not just getting a solutions provider — you’re getting a partner. The ReadyMode team works alongside you to customize a solution that does what you need it to do, and scales how you need it to scale. As you convert more leads, close more sales, and maximize your growth, you have a team of passionate professionals supporting you at every stage of the journey.
Readymode
Readymode is a cloud-based, predictive dialer software that helps call centers dial faster and connect smarter, so they can grow revenue, increase contact rates and make every call count. Our industry-leading, all-in-one platform delivers everything call centers need to make more connections, maximize agent productivity and scale their businesses affordably. Our latest release, Readymode iQ, includes innovative tools for compliance, DID management, call cadencing and more, so you can protect your revenue, and your reputation.
