Telemarketing Software Featured Article

One of the challenges of managing an Inside Sales team is to know which auto dialing software is best for your system.

In a recent blog post from Ken Murray (News - Alert), President of VanillaSoft, he discussed the pros and cons of three different versions of telemarketing software. The first, predictive dialing is familiar to all who have picked up a phone only to hear silence followed by a machine. The next system is known as progressive dialing which incorporates a bit more agent-customer talk time. And the last, preview dialing requires prior knowledge of the customer relationship in order to place a more individualized call.

Murray discussed the benefits and detriments to each of these telemarketing software systems while acknowledging that it is always best to keep in mind what the ultimate goals of your call center are when choosing a system. He argued that predictive dialing is relatively a thing of the past. The industry no longer requires that we employ a system that generates such robotic calls, and he suggests a movement away from focusing on "dials-per-hour." Emphasizing quality over quantity, Murray said that the focus of the call center industry should be, "leveraging a sales platform that can deliver the most quality conversations-per-hour with the best qualified prospects."

Moving on to progressive dialing, Murray notes that it "eliminates answer delays, hang-ups, and the non-professional approach of predictive dialing" which makes it the better fit for "Inside Sales teams that need to make lots of list based calls but do not need to do a major contact  record review prior to the call being placed." This system can save loads of time as it prevents the sales agent from neglecting to make the next call by automatically dialing it, and, if it incorporates 'next best call logic,' it will maximize the routing capabilities of the software. Next best call logic supports management software that enables the manager to input "pre- determined logic to literally 'push' the next best lead with all the relevant prospect or customer information out to the appropriate sales person," according to VanillaSoft's website.

Finally, with preview dialing, the sales agent is able to review the customer's history with the company before placing the call making for a more personalized sales experience. Often, as noted by Murray, important information about the customer can be issued on record including "social media connections prior to the dial." Ideally, the representative should possess the maximum amount of knowledge available about the customer before making the call, and if the software allows for the management to insert its own knowledge, the calls will be the most accurate.