We are looking to acquire a new dialer to support a blended inbound/outbound environment. What are some of the more important features and functionality that we should be looking for when selecting a new dialer?
Question
We are looking to acquire a new dialer to support a blended inbound/outbound environment. What are some of the more important features and functionality that we should be looking for when selecting a new dialer?
Answer
During the last few years, the contact center market has experienced a wave of innovation, driven to a great degree by cloud-based vendors who are not bound by the limitations of legacy systems.
A dialer should come with standard features such as the ability to do preview, progressive, predictive and power dialing; advanced predictive algorithms; voice mail detect; campaign management solutions; etc. It should also make it easy for customers and targets to return calls by providing a fully blended inbound/outbound servicing environment that facilitates intelligent routing and queuing.
Given the demands of customers today, dialers should be multi-channel solutions that make it easy for organizations to reach customers in their channel of choice, and to transfer from an automated channel to a live agent. As proactive customer care (multi-channel outbound notification) is an essential business function for most companies today, it should be a standard component of any dialer that you consider.
There are significant differences among dialing solutions. Some dialers come with cost-saving and productivity-enhancing features, such as phone number preview, to minimize needless calls and to increase the time agents spend actually speaking to customers. Below is a list of features that should be included in blended inbound/outbound dialing solutions:
- Intuitive administration environment that makes it easy for supervisors to define agents’ various roles and priorities
- Native ability to handle all types of interactions: calls, emails, text, faxes, tweets, etc.
- Advanced skill-based routing capabilities to ensure that interactions are directed to appropriate agents
- Tools that display a local number to each caller, to promote greater intimacy and encourage callbacks
- Adaptive real-time routing capabilities that can alter the priority of interactions and who receives them based on the real-time performance of the department
- An agent interface that makes it easy to dynamically switch the agent handling mode between inbound and outbound and various media
For more information, please see Best Practices for Optimizing Contacts with Blended Dialers.
