Customer engagement is critical to business success. That’s why call centers rely on dialer services to reach their entire contact list, especially when they’ve experienced quick growth and need to scale their business in a timely manner.
But how do you get the most out of your dialer once you’ve started using one? This post answers that question and more. We’re going to explore popular dialer options and best practices for optimizing your dialer engagement. But first, let’s take a look at what dialers are and their importance to call center success.
Let’s get into it.
A dialer is exactly what it sounds like: a software or system that aids in or actively conducts calls for your call center. They can free up agent workload (which can help you retain employees), analyze customer sentiment, and reduce downtime for your team.
A basic dialer will automatically dial a number, determine whether a person or machine has answered, and then either go through a designated message sequence or transfer the call to the person who answered.
There are several types of dialers though, which we’ll get into a bit later, that are more complex. Dialers can store information about a customer and are often used in outbound campaigns to reach more customers quickly.
Phone calls may not be the primary mode of outreach anymore (most people nowadays prefer texting), but that doesn’t mean it should be excluded from your marketing strategy. Many businesses use dialers for customer engagement and scaled outreach, including:
Here are the five of the most popular dialers call centers in the home improvement industry that help your business at scale. Many of these dialers also offer AI tools and solutions for you to consider.
RingCentral makes contacting your client list easier for your agents, offering omni-channel communication support for call centers across industries. It even has call center-specific solutions, including the RingCX (a generative AI tool).
RingCentral provides call centers with visibility into agent performance with more than 100 pre-built reports. Managers get insight into important metrics such as queue time, average handle time, and first contact resolution. Additionally, RingCentral has customizable dashboards so you can see KPIs, performance rates, and customer conversations in real time, all in one place. And speaking of KPIs, check out our State of the Call Center report for benchmarks to which you can compare your performance.
The agent experience is also set in visibility. Agents can see all of their customer interactions from any device. This empowers on-site, remote, and even hybrid teams to collaborate and stay on top of customer queues, reducing abandoned calls and providing automated feedback.
Made for contact centers, Five9 is a leading cloud-based communication software with a focus on phone and voice calls to connect with customers. If your call center is looking for additional ways to connect with customers though, they also offer other channels for customer communication like email and SMS.
Five9 eases the workload of agents by providing a collaborative AI experience. Customers can utilize the AI agent self-service option (a popular call center trend) and human agents can work more efficiently within their customer lists. Agent Assist from Five9 also gives agents the opportunity to get real-time training from the AI-driven conversations, leading to improved conversions.
Dialpad is an AI-centric dialer application developed to help optimize sales and contact centers. Its AI provides live coaching across channels for your agents, shows you call sentiment analysis, and offers teams a single workspace to collaborate in.
Dialpad truly allows agents to connect to customers wherever they are, including platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and even Apple Business Chat. Agents can more quickly connect to customers from anywhere, and digital agents support your team by solving customer requests with automated workflows.
Managers can also use Dialpad to help with quality management and improve performance tracking. Forecasting, agent scheduling, and even behavioral adherence can be tracked to ensure quality end-to-end customer service.
Dixa prides itself on being a flexible phone system capable of scaling with your business. With the ability to add or subtract agents from your engagement channels, Dixa makes scaling your business easy in any direction.
Its call distribution technology allows your business to do skill-based call routing, empowering agents to be paired with customers they’re most equipped to handle. Agents also get to pick their call algorithm, taking out the decision-making process by automatically distributing calls by agent priority, idle time, or whatever you choose to highlight.
Dixa also comes with backup scenarios, creating processes for overflow or giving customers the option to receive a callback instead of waiting in the call queue. This ensures even more limited call drop offs or stalled conversations, freeing up agents and giving customers the reassurance they need.
Freshworks offers a cloud-based software suite meant to ease the workload of customer support specialists, and Freshcaller is its dialer solution.
Freshcaller makes it easy for agents to converse with customers via voice services from an agent directly as well as from AI voice capabilities. Agents get support both in being able to see their customer profiles and conversation history, as well as decreased workloads thanks to AI-powered voice bots that can handle common queries and initial phone calls.
As a part of the Freshworks suite, Freshcaller works seamlessly with Freshdesk to convert calls into tickets. Freshcaller conversations can also be continued across channels through Freshdesk, so if this is the dialer you choose to look into, consider what else you may be looking for from a customer service perspective.
If you’re already paying for a dialer, you want to make sure you’re getting that return on investment. Here are five ways to make sure you maximize your ROI.
It’s likely that your dialer has integration capabilities, but that can mean something different for every provider (we cover this in our tips on choosing a texting platform as well). Set up for the integration will also vary depending on how fully and easily the two systems work together. Make sure you ask your dialer:
These questions will help you determine whether or not the integrations will save time for your team. It may also help you to create easier workflows for the long run.
If it doesn’t look like the integrations will save you time or it looks like workflows will be more complicated, that may be an indicator that it’s time to look for a new dialer.
Most dialers collect information about your customers during the phone conversations and store the conversation in the customer profile. Depending on your tool of choice, integration, and system display, you may be able to customize how you keep track of the inevitable increase in inbound and outbound correspondence.
Ideally, your dialer will allow you to organize your conversation threads according to your curated pipeline or place in the campaign. For example, Hatch contains every conversation within a contact card. That contact card collects conversations across channels and is displayed in a Trello-like user interface, called a Workspace.
Tracking conversations with user-friendly interfaces makes using dialers and texting platforms alike more convenient and keeps you organized.
When your dialer offers customizability for your conversation tracking, you can have full visibility of customer conversations, easily manage hand-offs, and oversee conversations for upsell or training opportunities.
There are multiple dialer types, each one with its pros, cons, and specialties. Depending on the type of dialer you’re using, you may not be the best match for their specific use cases. Some popular dialer types include:
If you feel like your dialer should be getting a higher ROI, make sure you’re using the right dialer for the right purposes. Set up a meeting with your dialer to improve your use cases and watch your metrics soar.
One of the best things your dialer does for you is gives you more insight into your qualitative data. Tracking customer sentiment and being able to show you a shift or key moment in the conversation is greatly beneficial to both your business and your agents on the calls.
However, having this data means very little if you don’t have a way to measure and respond to it. Luckily, there are ways you can quantify this data. For example, you might look at the number of positive sentiments per week or the rate of specific key moments in a call per conversation. You could compare sentiment trends per job type, integrate the successful responses to key moments in your agent training, and more.
Ultimately, you need to figure out what you want to get out of this data and see where your business will benefit most from collecting that data. But having these metrics is critical to determining how successful the use of your dialer, and your business, is.
Automation and message sequencing have become an integral part of business success. These tools save your team time otherwise spent on manual processes, and money that gets wasted due to human error or missed opportunities.
For example, Hatch allows you to automate your outreach with phone, text, and email, giving you a fully hands-off experience while increasing your customer outreach. Some dialers offer these capabilities as well.
You can also use a platform like Hatch to accompany your phone outreach with text and email, which can improve response rates.
Be it a dialer or a texting platform, AI is everywhere. These tools are phasing out legacy systems and can relieve your human agents from some of their most resource-heavy tasks. Of course, AI tools have a learning curve. Be proactive in keeping your team ahead of the AI revolution and educate them on the pros, cons, and potential pitfalls of AI tools. Many dialers have AI components, so staying educated and leaning into AI adoption in your workflows will boost agent efficiency in the long run. At the same time, taking advantage of the dialer AI capabilities will help you to increase your ROI.
Dialers are a great way to alleviate some of the workload from call center agents and can help you to know even more about your customers. To recap, here are the five best practices for you to implement when using your dialer:
The right dialer for your business may be different from the one you’re currently using, so keep these tips in mind if you’re in the process of reevaluating your current dialer or looking for a new one. Be sure to get a comprehensive look at what the dialer offers and take advantage of demos if it offers them.
Speaking of demos, you can get a quick 15-minute demo of Hatch here. We’ll give you a quick look at our platform from the perspective of text communication, show you how it works, and show you how Hatch can improve your customer communication while also growing your revenue. You can also watch a demo here.