In days gone by, outbound dialling systems would cost about the same as a small house. Today however, things have changed. Modern phone systems and low cost software can now deliver the same productivity benefits for just a few hundred pounds per user. Even better, new technology means that you can start to benefit from a dialler with as few as two users. To a mortgage broker, packager or provider a dialler equals massive productivity gains and now at an affordable cost.
Scepticism
Despite a level of scepticism, many in the industry are realising the benefits of an outbound dialling system when buying and self-generating leads. Marc Fortune, managing director at Infinite Mortgages, says: “In common with many brokers we both buy and self-generate leads, and then pass them to a salesperson. This seems satisfactory but we could never be sure when, or if, a lead had been called. We were also unable to identify how much of the money we spent on leads actually generated sales.
“We had noticed a few trends, for example, the quicker we responded to a lead, the greater the chance of a sale. Also, I could see that some staff were making more calls and sales than others but could neither measure this accurately nor identify why this should be the case.”
In January of last year, Infinite Mortgages implemented ‘Adaptive’, from New Media Software. Now, when a lead arrives, it is automatically queued and delivered to the next available salesperson as a call. During the call, the salesperson updates the dialler with the outcome of the call and updates the in-house database. The dialler records a complete history of each salespersons’ activity and a comprehensive management reporting tool, which enables the user to identify user productivity, track leads to sales and provides a host of other useful management information.
Improving productivity
While automated diallers have improved productivity, it has also benefited the user. Alison Whitehouse, communications centre manager at Computeach, says:
“We knew that we needed to help our customer service team to be even more efficient and were aware that a predictive dialler would achieve this. But there is far more to running a successful call centre operation that just call volume. From our point of view, there were a number of negatives associated with going down the route of having a dialler. It’s all very well to improve efficiency and make more outbound calls per hour, but not at the expense of staff morale, legal compliance or customer service – or if it would affect our ability to manage the inbound calls properly as well.”
She added: “I was very suspicious to start with. As communication centre manager, the happiness of my team is equally as important as meeting my target call volumes. I had a concern that implementing a predictive dialler would cause problems with morale and could lead to us losing staff.
“But I needn’t have worried as the Adaptive Predictive Dialler has been an absolute godsend. Not only are we making more calls per day than previously, my team are not having to listen to an outbound dialling tone all day, which is a real benefit for them. It came at exactly the right time and has in fact dramatically improved morale rather than the opposite, which we had feared might be the case initially.”
Benefits
c Automated dialling can double and sometimes treble the number of effective calls that each user can make per hour.
c Automated dialling will increase sales by ensuring that all leads are called and at the time that is most likely to generate a sale.
c Increased productivity leads to better profitability.
c Better management reporting leads to better staff management.
c Users like automated dialling – it makes their life easier.
c Automated dialling systems are now low cost and will deliver business benefits even if you only have a very small team.
c To a mortgage broker, packager or provider a dialler equals massive productivity gains and now at an affordable cost.
