Today we’re taking an upside-down view of our topic. Your call center probably uses a predictive dialer. We’re going to look at a few ways you can fully waste its potential.
You may be interested to learn how many of these you’re doing already!
A predictive dialer makes outbound calls to customers or leads, based on when it expects an agent will be free. The aim is to connect agents to prospects as consistently as possible, and get rid of manual dialling.
Its prediction isn’t a guess; it’s a calculation based on things like average call length and time to answer.
A predictive dialer is typically used to nurture leads, make sales, collect debts or deliver customer service. A predictive dialer or auto dialer is a powerful tool. Now, let’s think about how we’re going to waste that power.
How to waste your predictive dialer
#1 Take ages to contact fresh leads
There are a lot of ways new leads will come into your business. Your call list will fill up from web forms, in-store enquiries, customer referrals and more.
Of course, your competitors’ call lists are filling up too, often with the very same customers.
Between 35-50% of sales go to the first vendor who responds to a customer enquiry. That means the first trick to wasting your predictive dialer is waiting a long time before acting on the lead.
The average first response time of B2B leads is 42 hours, so… wait two full days, to avoid making any sales.
#2 Don’t recycle leads your predictive dialer didn’t reach
Obviously, not everyone picks up the phone when you call. In fact, 80% of calls go to voicemail.
Now, it’s pretty simple to set up an automation that recycles failed contacts. That way, your predictive dialer will try the contact again later, without your agent having to do anything manually.
You could even pre-set a fixed number of contact attempts, or use customer profiling to decide what time to make calls.
But if you do that, you’ll have to make more sales… and more money… and doesn’t that sound tiring?
[qodef_blockquote text=”‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’” title_tag=”h3″ width=””]
Wayne Gretsky, ‘The Greatest Hockey Player Ever’
#3 Don’t give agents contextual information
Let’s say I made a recent enquiry about something your business sells. Now you’re calling me to seal the deal. Ok, go.
Tricky isn’t it – because you don’t know who I am or what the product is.
Apply the same logic to your agents. Sure, you could integrate your dialer with the systems that hold data on your leads.
Sure, those systems could supply real-time data on each lead as they’re connected.
Sure, that would help the worryingly high number of agents who can’t access the information they need to close sales.
But isn’t it more fun to make your agents guess?
#4 Assign your calls to agents randomly
This is an important one. To really make sure that you’re wasting your predictive dialer, make agent selection totally random.
That means no deeply integrated systems! Obviously you could match your customers to individual agents or teams, based on all kinds of information. Customer profile, the nature of the enquiry, number of previous contacts, agent skills… the list goes on.
It’s especially important to assign randomly when you’re avoiding lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is most effective when a customer can talk to the same agent (or to a correctly skilled and informed agent) every time. But, nurtured leads make purchases worth 47% more than non-nurtured leads, and that’s the last thing we want.
#5 Do NOTHING about call outcomes
And finally… once the call is over, what should you do about recording call outcomes? That’s right – nothing at all.
Ok, your agents might want to jot something down on the back of an envelope, but that’s it.
Perhaps you’ve heard that it’s easy and profitable to automate everything around call outcomes?
For example, automatic SMS or email to confirm purchases. Or the automatic removal of bad leads. Or even the everyday recording of your success in terms of calls made, total sales, call length and the rest.
Yep, it is easy and profitable to automate those. But I’m sure the agents and their envelopes remember pretty much how every call went. Right?
Or maybe you don’t want to waste your predictive dialer?
If for some reason, you want to use your predictive dialer to save time and make money – we can help with that.
In our experience, the real power of most call center software is wasted. babelforce is the world-leading platform for integration and automation. We can show you a side of your predictive dialer you’ve never seen before – and then you can get to work.
