How Power Dialers Improve Business Productivity
Communication plays a huge role in the growth and sustainability of any business. The way you interact with your customers and suppliers will determine how they’re going to respond to your offers. As such, many successful businesses have invested in in-house or outsourced contact center services.
This department consists of more than just skilled personnel. There are several computers and other devices that make a productive contact center. With many advancements in technology, companies now have access to modern products that can take their communication strategies a level higher.
Automated dialing is a popular feature in today’s contact centers, with more people seeing the need to invest in call automation services from companies like Power Dialer. Dialers are basically tools that can be programmed to make calls by dialing one contact after the other. Keep reading to learn more about power dialers and ways they can enhance your business.
What is a power dialer?
Also known as a call automation system, a power dialer is an outbound dialer that’s programmed to call phone numbers in a given list. The contacts are dialed one after the other, depending on the set order of preference.
Once an agent has listed the contacts they want to call, the power dialer will do the rest of the tasks. At the end of every call, your agent will only have to take care of the information they’ve gathered from the clients as the power dialer calls the next phone number.
How different is a power dialer from a predictive dialer?
Before going any further with this topic, it’s important to debunk the common belief that power and predictive dialers refer to the same system. Many people confuse the two dialers perhaps because of the similar modes of operation. Of course, they both automatically dial contacts provided in a given list. But as call automation services like Call Cowboy offer both, it’d be prudent to understand the difference before investing your money.
One of the main differences is evident in how the systems handle the calls with reference to the availability of an agent. Predictive dialers dial a contact then direct the call to the next available agent without any form of preference. On the other hand, power dialers call the phone numbers listed by a user in a specified order.
From these distinctive features, you can deduce that predictive dialers are useful when your contact center has to handle many phone numbers with preference being least of your priority. Power dialers are very beneficial if your strategy is based on preference whereby certain contacts are called in a particular order.
Now that you understand the difference between the two systems, here is a list of reasons you should consider investing in power dialers:
- Enhance time management
Time is a crucial currency in the success of your business. Therefore, you need to take care of it and ensure that you get the most out of every single minute. Unfortunately, though, many people always waste time in areas where they least expect. In a contact center, for instance, a few seconds are wasted every time employees are forced to wait as they manually dial phone numbers before a call.
In addition, agents may find themselves idling for more seconds as they wait for the other person to pick up the call. These delays constitute what’s popularly known as idle time, which refers to the total time within which the agent’s productivity wasn’t up to the required standards due to several factors.
With power dialers, this time of unproductivity (which may add up to 20% of the total working time) can be reduced significantly. This system automates the recurring tasks like dialing and call waiting. As such, the agent will use this time recording information or doing something useful.
- Improve the employees’ efficiency
The idea of going through the same process over and over can be monotonous and frustrating sometimes. For instance, before finally connecting to a customer, an agent using a manual dialer will have to go through a given list, find the contacts they’re looking for, dial the digits one after the other, and then wait for the call to go through.
This process can become tiresome and the employee may end up making unnecessary mistakes even if it’s simple. Dialing a wrong number or recording inaccurate information, for instance, can lead to a lot of time wastage. Also, the inaccuracies that grow out of this can have a significant impact on the company’s future decision-making.
Power dialers can help solve this problem and increase the agent’s efficiency by reducing the number of tasks one has to handle at every given time. For instance, the fact that one will only be required to talk to a customer and record important highlights of the conversation can enhance productivity and accurate collection of data.
The agents will even have enough time to countercheck whatever they’ve recorded, which can go a long way in helping your business grow. Remember, efficiency in this department is measured by counting the number of calls made within a given time and the accuracy of the information collected. With a power dialer, all these numbers will go up by a significant margin. (4)
- Increase agent talk time
Apart from idle time, another important feature worth measuring in a contact center is agent talk time. It’s one of those factors that you’d want to increase as much as possible. The main reason you have agents in the first place is to enhance communication with customers and ensure that you convert as many prospects as you can.
There are many factors that can determine the conversion rate of prospective callers. One of them would be the skills of your agents. But even with that, there’s still a need for enough agent talk time. The more time your employees spend trying to explain your products and services to customers, the higher the chances of winning their hearts. (3)
One thing that prevents many companies from allowing their employees enough time on the phone is idle time. If your department is still relying on manual dialers, then there’s a high chance that you’ll struggle trying to increase agent talk time, especially if you have a lot of calls to make per day. That’s where power dialers come into play.
Power dialers are designed to automate those activities that don’t necessarily need human intervention. By doing this, more free time is created, and the agents can then spend enough time on every call, which is an important factor in every successful company, especially those that have this as one of their main marketing strategies.
- Enhance real-time monitoring
Monitoring the performance of your employees is key to the growth of your business because you’ll know what to change or improve. In a call center, the main factors to monitor are the number of calls made per day, the amount of time spent on each call, and the number of prospects converted at the end of the day. You can measure the productivity of your employees using this set of information.
By knowing the number of potential customers converted to real clients, you’ll have an idea of what to introduce to your employees’ performance. This information can be easily found by going through the recordings stored by your power dialer.
Power dialers also save the number of calls made and the length of every conversation. You can compare all the data and see which agent handled the most calls in a given month. It’s also imperative that you check the same agent’s data and see if they were also able to convince more clients to buy your products or services. (1)
So, what’s the essence of monitoring your employees? For one, it shows you the productivity levels of each employee. By analyzing the data, you’ll know which agent needs to improve in terms of numbers and which one should focus on bettering the quality of their work.
How will you choose the right power dialer?
The current market has a wide selection of power dialers because of ever-advancing technology. Therefore, if you’re not conversant with these programs, it can be difficult to pinpoint the right option for your business. To avoid making the wrong decision, it’s important that you consider the size of your company, the needs and behaviors of your audience base, compatibility with your customer relation management, and-–importantly-–the available budget. (2)
Conclusion
Power dialers can have a huge impact on the performance of your business. This call automations system was designed to replace the famous manual dialers. Unlike these old-school devices, power dialers can automatically dial phone numbers from a given list one after the other. Investing in this technology can go a long way to improving the productivity of your agents.
If you’re looking for a great way to enhance the productivity of your business, then using automated call systems is your best bet. As agents won’t spend most of their time dialing and waiting for calls to connect, they’ll have enough room to record accurate data and will also take their time trying to convince prospective customers.
References
- “How To Monitor Your Employees While Respecting Their Privacy.”, Source: https://hbr.org/2020/05/how-to-monitor-your-employees-while-respecting-their-privacy
- “What You Need To Know Before Investing In A Power Dialer.”, Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/05/07/what-you-need-to-know-before-investing-in-a-power-dialer/
- “Working In A Call Center: Everything You Need To Know.”, Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/working-call-center
- “4 Methods To Increase Employee Productivity.”, Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245644
