How Smart Dialers Supercharge Contact Center Productivity

If you’re tasked with running outbound campaigns, you need to ensure your team’s working at its most efficient at all times. Even with all the training and clean data in the world, you’re only as fast and productive as the technology in front of you.

Making the shift from manual dialing, call logging, and after-call work to a smart dialer solution is a great first step to saving time, reducing mistakes, and starting to book more sales calls, delighting customers, and reducing no-show appointments.

Features That Make a Smart Dialer “Smart”

Here are four key features that put the “smart” into smart dialers.

Automated dialing

The purpose of any outbound call center software is to speed up the dialing process. Instead of relying on humans to dial every single phone number — a process prone to error — smart dialers automatically dial contacts from a call list and connect agents to the call.

Calls only connect when a live person answers, reducing wasted time on unanswered calls and voicemails. A power dialer, for example, intelligently uses sequential dialing to maximize agent throughput. When you upload a list of contacts, it makes its way through the list more ruthlessly than other dialers. That’s why it’s called a power dialer.

Key Benefit: Agents can handle more calls per hour, significantly increasing productivity.

Predictive dialing

In an outbound call center, a predictive dialer uses machine learning algorithms and historical call data to predict agent availability and call answer rates, ensuring optimal call routing and workload distribution.

When doing so, there’s less reliance on agents manually making themselves available and less chance of calls getting routed to a busy agent.

Key Benefit: Boosts efficiency by minimizing agent downtime and maximizing connections.

Local presence dialing

When calling customers and prospects in specific geographical locations, you can increase the chance of calls being answered by adjusting the caller ID to reflect a local area code.

Dynamically changing your outbound CLI to match the person you’re calling makes your prospects, in theory, more likely to answer calls.

Key Benefit: May improve call answering rate.

Real-time analytics and call recording

Top-of-the-range smart dialer solutions record conversations and provide insights into agent performance, call trends, and customer feedback.

Here, you’re getting two-for-one functionality:

• Call recording technology enables quality assurance and sentiment analysis.
• Real-time analytics provide details of trends, changes in metric patterns, and key performance indicator (KPI) measurements.

Key Benefit: Enhances coaching and supports compliance.

Business Benefits of Implementing a Smart Dialer

Let’s take a look at five top benefits your business can enjoy by using a smart dialer.

Increased efficiency

Automating dialing frees agents from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on meaningful conversations with prospects and customers. The more time you create for agents, the more potential there is for successful outcomes in your outbound campaigns.

Enhanced scalability

Auto dialers help with scaling your call center — whether you’re managing 10 agents or 1,000. As smart dialers are cloud-based, they scale with your team, ensuring consistent performance as your business grows. There’s no need to buy new hardware each time you go through a merger or acquisition, and turning on new agent licenses takes just a few clicks.

Data-driven decisions

When you connect systems and get automatic analysis of data and call outcomes, call center managers, and sales leaders can adjust strategies on the fly.

You can use historical call data like average talk time, average handle time, and average speed of answer to inform wider business strategies, improving sales targeting and outbound campaign planning.

Improved agent satisfaction

When agents don’t have to physically dial numbers all day, encounter busy tones, misdial numbers, and reach voicemails, they’ll thank you for implementing a smart dialer system. The introduction of simplified workflows reduces stress, prevents burnout, and improves agent engagement to the nth degree.

Stronger compliance

Every call you make in a call center is under great scrutiny from regulations like Do Not Call (DNC) lists, GDPR, and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Using smart dialer technology reduces legal risks by removing the need for manual dialing and the chance of misuse.

Creative Use Cases for Smart Dialers

Outbound dialers, smart or otherwise, aren’t just for sales teams (though they are a major benefit). Here are some more out-of-the-box examples of how businesses are using smart dialers.

Customer success teams

Ensuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) doesn’t only mean treating customers well on inbound calls. Your customer service strategy may benefit from proactively reaching out to customers for check-ins, renewals, and surveys.

As a result, expect to improve CSAT and retention rates. You can combine these measures with number-based KPIs for a holistic view of how your contact center is performing.

Healthcare providers

The cost of no-show appointments (patients not arriving at their scheduled timeslot) costs healthcare providers an average of $196 per appointment.

In terms of providing a return on investment, opting for smart dialing could reduce X number of missed appointments and earn back the cost of no-shows simply by automatically scheduling follow-ups and sending reminders to patients.

E-commerce businesses

When someone adds items to their online shopping cart and fills in their shipping details but doesn’t complete the payment, something has gone wrong. This might be because the price at the end of the process wasn’t quite what they expected, or perhaps a technical issue occurred.

Whatever the reason, automating callbacks for abandoned carts can trigger more sales and higher conversion rates and revenue. The simple process of receiving a call when customers have issues checking out could prove a worthy purchase that leads to record-breaking sales figures.

Challenges and How Smart Dialers Overcome Them

As with any technology, there are always going to be a few challenges. But here’s how smart dialers can solve these potential issues.

Challenge 1: Low answer rates

Dialer software can help reduce poor returns when making outbound calls. No matter how strong your sales script or your sales staff, if customers don’t answer the phone, there’s nobody to sell to.

Solution: Local presence dialing improves answer rates by presenting a familiar area code to recipients. For example, if your customer is in the Austin area, you can show a 512 area code even if your business operates out of California.

Challenge 2: Agent burnout

It’s a tough job being a call center agent, especially for those tasked with repeated cold calling and telemarketing. They’ve got low rates of answer to contend with, alongside the pushback on certain calls that do get answered. The additional time spent remedying misdials and waiting for voicemails only adds to call center burnout.

Solution: Automation reduces repetitive tasks, allowing agents to focus on high-value interactions.

Challenge 3: Data silos

When outbound contact center agents get tasked with starting conversations, they’re not always privy to the finer details that could push these calls to the next level. By segmenting customer details, product information, and sales data away from frontline agents, you’re restricting agent performance.

Solution: CRM integrations unify customer data, ensuring agents have all the relevant information for personalized conversations.

Challenge 4: Compliance risks

When making outbound calls at scale, the biggest business risk is falling foul of one of the strict regulations relating to telemarketing and other outbound campaigns. When left to their own devices, sales agents may be tempted to use underhand tactics to meet their targets, resulting in fines, operating restrictions, and even imprisonment.

Solution: Features like DNC management, call recording, and GDPR compliance mitigate legal and ethical challenges.

Why Smart Business Choose Nextiva

Nextiva’s smart dialer seamlessly integrates with CRM systems, enabling personalized and efficient campaigns tailored to goals like lead generation and retention. By using all your available data, you get call and customer analytics that turn into business insights you can use to inform your outbound strategy.

As well as providing outbound dialing software, Nextiva is an all-in-one contact center solution that unifies voice, email, SMS, and chat for a complete outbound experience. For example, you can send SMS notifications of appointment reminders when patients don’t answer calls and improve the conversion rate of abandoned carts by triggering emails offering help or discounts.

With Nextiva, you get:

• Smart dialer software
• Call recording
• Sentiment analysis
• Call monitoring for supervisors
• Campaign management with audience segmentation
• Agent performance tracking
• Call reporting and analytics
• Lead scoring and prioritization add-on

Scalable for businesses of any size, Nextiva boasts award-winning 24/7 support, so you’re never on your own when it comes to business communication.

Ready to supercharge outbound productivity? Learn more about Nextiva’s outbound call center.