It is generally known that call center software tools differ by numerous criteria, but one of the main methods of classification is dividing call center software into two groups – inbound call center software, and outbound call center software.
Well, inbound call center software is used mainly for providing customer service and customer support, and outbound call center software is focused on sales and lead generation. Basically, all telemarketing tasks are done with the help of outbound call center software.
So let’s deal with the main questions: what is the definition of outbound call center software? What are its main benefits? Do you need an outbound call center solution?
Outbound Call Center Software Definition
Outbound call center software is used to perform outbound calls or outgoing calls in other words. Such outgoing calls might be used for many purposes, including telemarketing, lead generation, follow-up calls, sales calls, feedback collection, and so on. There is also a very important fact that there are two types of outgoing calls – automated calls and outbound calls that are processed by your call center agents.
What are the main benefits of outbound call center software?
First of all, outbound call center software gives you a great advantage over your competitors as it automates all calling processes, and as you could guess, it moves your performance and effectiveness to an absolutely new level. It also positively influences agent occupancy and performance, as well as it can help you to boost agent experience and satisfaction. No one wants to do useless work manually and an outbound call center software solution eliminates this issue for your call center agents.
Also, outbound call center software collects and provides you with all the data about your outgoing calling campaigns which means you can analyze this data and make thoughtful decisions about further changes, or improvements in your cold calling campaigns.
Moreover, you can use outbound call center software for editing and creating call scripts as call scripts are very important for cold calling campaigns because they help agents keep calls in the right flow and convince prospective customers to close the deal.
What are the main features of an outbound call center software solution?
As an outbound call center software solution is all about cold calling and doing lead generation or cold sales via phone calls, it can provide you with three different calling modes that are designed to cover your business requirements and help you perform better in different conditions and circumstances.
The first calling mode is called predictive dialer and it is the most advanced algorithm of outbound call center software solutions ever made. Its main advantage over other algorithms and manual dialing is its speed.
A predictive dialer can easily measure the average talking time of each agent that is involved in a cold calling campaign and this means that the system will start dialing another phone number from the contact list even if the previous conversation is still in progress. Thus, when the agent ends a conversation, he’s immediately linked to another call with the live person. Based on that, the average agent occupancy rate with the help of a predictive dialer is boosted up to 80 or 85%.
It’s not the end of the benefits list of a predictive dialer – its dialing speed is over 100 dialing attempts per hour, while manually you can perform less than 35. The success rate (or response rate) for such a solution is over 75%, while manually this rate is sometimes less than 40%. Thus, the solution offers your 800 dialing attempts per working shift of one call center agent while manually you will never perform more than 250 dialing attempts.
The predictive dialer is perfect for cold calling, telemarketing, updating old contact lists, lead generation, and other purposes that are related to cold leads and cold contact lists.
Power dialer is another calling mode of the outbound call center software solution that is mostly used for warm leads and calling your current customer base as it has an absolutely different algorithm from its brother predictive dialer. It doesn’t predict the average talking time of any agents, but it has other advantages that make it more capable than a predictive dealer for some purposes.
First of all, the dialing speed of the power dialer is around 75 calls per hour with success rates starting from 50% if your contact list isn’t qualitative, and up to 75% of success rate. Nonetheless, the power dialer has some features to beat the predictive dialer’s speed. A power dialer doesn’t need more than one agent to be all set and operate properly, while a predictive dialer needs at least five agents to show its maximum efficiency and performance. Secondly, a poorly configured predictive dialer can cause dropped calls while a power dialer can’t. Take into account that in some countries dropped calls are illegal if there are too many of them – for example, in the United States if your dropped calls rate is over 5% you will be fined.
Finally, the power dialer can leave cold voicemail drops while the predictive dialer can’t.
The preview dialer is the final dialing mode that allows you to provide personalized service. It shows a customer card for each customer from the contact list before calling, and the agent can decide whether to call or not. The average dialing speed is around 50 dialing attempts per hour, with over 50% of success rate, but the success rate depends only on the quality of your contact list. Its advantage is the ability to provide highly personalized service for every customer. This type of auto dialer can be beneficial for such industries as financial services, insurance, companies, and so on.
All dialing modes can identify invalid phone numbers and bypass them. For unsuccessful calls, you can set up customizable redialing rules so all unsuccessful calls will be redialed automatically. Also, all of the auto dialers provide you with detailed statistics, insights, and customer data after each cold calling campaign. All of them can also run multiple cold calling campaigns.
