A great question that is getting around not just call centers but sales teams generally is how to increase productivity and efficiency. This is where dialers step in. If you’re just getting started figuring out what is the best style of dialing this post is a great start but if you need to know more let us know! In this post we will be covering Manual PBX dialing, Preview and Progressive.
Manual PBX dialing
This is what you are likely doing now. Give the agent a list, tell them to call. The agent will punch the number in to the phone and off they go. This has very few upsides with some serious downsides.
- Far too many human factors like wait time between calls
- Harder to get clear reporting
- Very hard to look at metadata
- Agent will waste time looking up the CRM record
- Faster agent fatigue as the process of each call takes more effort from them
- You need to keep each agent individually motivated
- Agent will spend a lot of time listening to dialtones/answering machines
Preview/Progressive Dialer
Here we move into automatic dialers. This is the first step for many teams and depending on your needs may be the best choice for you. At this point the agent is presented with the CRM record and then the call is started. The agent will still be listening to a dial tone but the advantages are clear over manual dialing.
- Client record in CRM is automatically displayed on screen
- Individual agents or whole teams can be given a list to call from one place
- Progressive usually used for customer segmentation to add the ability to assign contacts to specific agents, example: Collections campaigns if the agents get commissions, you can segment the list based on the amount of recovery
- You get the choice of agents choosing when to initiate a call or set it to an automatic pace of your choosing.
We hope this helped you understand more about dialers and their uses. In the following post, we will be covering Power, Predictive and Voice Broadcast dialers.