High-volume outbound campaigns can help call centers increase their sales and improve customer engagement. You probably won’t get optimal results by using outdated technology, though. Boost your KPIs by adding predictive dialers to your call center.
If you already use predictive dialers, make sure you optimize your campaign settings to make your campaigns more successful. Even a slight change can lead to major improvements. The following tips should help you find ways to make your predictive dialer more effective than ever.
Organize Your Contact Lists
Your list of leads may contain outdated or inaccurate information that will force call agents to waste their time. Scrub your lists before you start your next campaign. Taking a little time now to purge old contact info will make it much easier for your representatives to do their jobs efficiently.
Organizing your scrubbed contact list can also make calls more efficient and successful. Consider segmenting numbers by demographics, leads scores, and geographic areas. Segmenting your lists will help agents reach contacts and convert them into customers.
Your work doesn’t end once you prune and segment your list. Review them regularly to make sure you still have accurate information. Contact numbers can age quickly, so you want to remove outdated contacts as soon as possible.
Improve Your Database Management
Make sure you store your contact lists in an external database. Many call centers use SQL databases or Excel. Putting your lists in an external database makes it easy to sort and randomize your contacts.
Randomizing your contact lists tend to reduce abandonment rates and lower wait times. Ideally, your agents will reach more people and convince them to buy products.
Many databases also have features that let you focus on specific segments of your contact lists. Once you pull contacts from a specific segment, you can call the numbers randomly.
Choose Outbound Numbers That Will Help You Reach Contacts
Choosing the right outbound numbers is one of the most important things that you can do during outbound campaigns. Most people won’t answer calls coming from unfamiliar area codes. More often than not, it makes sense to choose outbound numbers with local area codes. For example, if an agent calls someone in Indianapolis, you should choose an outbound number with a 463 area code.
Purchase numbers for all of the geographic areas that you plan to call during your outbound campaigns. As long as you choose the right numbers, more people will answer your calls.
Make sure you get some toll-free numbers, too. While leads don’t answer them as often as they answer local calls, nationwide 800 numbers work well when you want people to return your calls. The importance of toll-free numbers has fallen in recent years as more people choose smartphones over landlines. Enough consumers use landlines, though, that you should still have some toll-free numbers available.
Monitor Your Outbound Numbers for Flags
The trend toward using mobile phones has made it easier for service providers and call-blocking apps to identify potential spam. If your predictive dialers use the same outbound number too many times during an hour or day, you increase the chance that the number will get flagged as spam.
Maintaining a deep pool of numbers will help you avoid call blockers. The more calls you make during a campaign, the more numbers you need in your pool. By switching your numbers frequently, you make it harder for apps and carriers to flag your calls. If people see a spam alert, they will not answer the phone. Once a number gets too hot, you must stop using it.
You can also use software to monitor your outbound numbers for spam alerts. When a numbered gets flagged, replace it with a fresh number that will reach your customers.
Use KPI Data to Optimize Your Dialing Rates
You should base your dialing rates on your team’s KPI data. Track important information so you can fine-tune your predictive dialers calling rate. Some of the most important pieces of data to track include:
- Your number of available agents.
- Average call times.
- Average connection rates.
Keeping a close eye on your KPI data will let you decide when your predictive dialers are contacting leads too heavily. You may want to back off a bit to give your team members time to recover between calls. Stressed agents will have a very hard time meeting quotas.
You also want to watch your abandonment rates. Typically, you can expect to see abandonment rates between 5% and 8%. If you reach 10% or higher, then you need to analyze your KPI data and take a different approach to optimizing your dialing rates.
A high abandonment rate will ruin outbound campaigns. When people hang up on your agents, they might also report your number as spam. If too many people report your numbers, then call-blocking apps will do their jobs.
Service providers also pay attention to abandonment rates. If a carrier’s system notices that a lot of people are hanging up on your number, then it might flag you to prevent customers from getting annoyed.
Integrate Your Predictive Dialer and CRM to Automate Tasks and Close More Sales
A predictive dialer can automatically improve your campaign’s efficiency by dialing numbers quickly and reducing agent downtime. Calling numbers quickly, however, doesn’t always lead to more sales. That changes when you integrate your predictive dialer with a CRM.
A CRM system can tell your call agents a lot of useful information about leads. For example, your CRM can tell sales representatives about a customer’s previous purchases. It can also provide information about customer demographics. All of that data appears on the agent’s screen when the call gets made. No one has to flip through binder pages. Everything happens simultaneously.
Knowing more about leads means that your call agents can close deals faster. By spending less time converting each lead, they can complete more successful calls during their working hours.
Integrating predictive dialers with a CRM also reduces the number of tasks that your agents need to perform between calls. Instead of forcing your employees to enter information manually, the CRM can log KPIs automatically. Suddenly, your sales reps get to focus on what they do best – reaching out to people and converting them into customers.
Analyze Your KPIs Constantly to Improve Performance
Never assume that your campaign’s efficiency or success will stay the same throughout the day. You shouldn’t even assume that the same approach will work from one hour to the next.
Instead, you need to analyze your KPIs constantly so you can make small adjustments that will improve performance. If you notice that the abandonment rate is creeping higher than you’d like, you can scale back your predictive dialer’s speed. If you see that an outbound number has been used too much over the last few hours, you can swap it for a new number that will reach more people.
Don’t let complacency ruin your campaigns. You always have opportunities for improvement. If nothing else, you need to make sure that you stay on the right track to meet your goals.
Conclusion
Setting up a high-volume outbound campaign can become a tedious process. Every call center manager has had to deal with complex campaigns. When you adopt the right tools, you can streamline and optimize your process. You should find that you make the most of your operational costs and improve your call center’s ROI.
Call Tools can always help you choose predictive dialers and other tools to optimize your outbound campaigns. Contact our team to learn more about how Call Tools features will make your job easier while increasing your conversions.
