5 ways auto dialer can make a smarter contact strategy
upgrow
Sep 26, 2023
Your company’s marketing contact strategy should improve the customer experience, generate leads, close sales, and grow your market share. It all sounds quite complicated, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be.
Mapping out your customer’s journey is the first step. The second is using auto-dialer software alongside your marketing contact strategy to continually engage every customer at every stage of their journey.
The importance of positive customer experience
A positive experience is critical for 96% of today’s consumers to remain loyal to a brand. However, if your business lacks a contact strategy, or doesn’t have established marketing communication channels, then you’re not properly engaging your audience. Eventually, your customers will go elsewhere. So, what role does auto-dialer software play in improving your customer’s journey and upgrading your contact strategy?
First, we’ll start by explaining how your business can devise a strategy for your customer’s journey. Afterward, we’ll outline five ways auto-dialer software can improve your contact strategy by expanding your marketing reach and upgrading your customers’ experiences.
Defining the whole customer journey
Think about the time it takes for leads to be qualified and for those leads to become customers. For a business with an eCommerce website, the process can happen within minutes. However, for other businesses, turning leads and prospects into customers can take much longer.
Companies often refer to this process as a sales cycle. Other businesses call it the buyer’s journey. Regardless of what it’s called, leads generally go through multiple steps before they become customers. Having a contact strategy means you’re developing those leads at every stage of their journey.
At each of these steps, a prospect or lead may require different information. At one stage, you may choose to direct customers online to a specific landing page on your website. At another, you may need to communicate directly with customers over the phone to provide critical data and information.
Each of these stages comes with its own set of challenges. However, by mapping out the entire customer journey, you’ll have a better idea of what each customer needs and when.
These steps are often referred to as:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision and
- Retention
Different stages of a customer journey
Understanding each of the stages of your customer’s journey will help you optimize your strategy and improve your customer relationships.
- Awareness: Customer expresses interest in the product or service.
- Consideration: The customer may have compared products but is now considering buying from your company.
- Decision: The customer makes a decision to buy from your company.
- Retention: The customer returns to place another order and vouches for your product or service.
Account for different buyer personas
Your business likely has many types of decision-makers or “buyer personas.” Each of these buyer personas requires a unique journey, which involves a separate strategy.
Outline each of your buyer personas and describe how they make decisions. Define what these prospects find most important when making a go/no-go decision. Be specific about their journey by itemizing the information, data, and support they need at each stage.
Think of your buyer personas as different customer segments. Each of these segments requires a different approach. Outlining your strategy for each will simplify the way you help prospects navigate their journey while putting your team in the all-important driver’s seat.
5 ways of auto dialer
1. Auto-dialers improve your overall contact strategy
Every customer journey has a stage where your call center, customer service, or sales team must speak to the customer on the phone. Keeping track of when to call different buyer personas at different stages of their journeys can be problematic at best, and impossible at worst.
Your contact strategies must reach out to customers at specific periods so your team can help them to the next stage of their journey. This means engaging the right customers at the right time. Along the way, your team needs to capture critical customer data and information so that they can be prepared for the next follow-up call.
None of this is possible with an Excel sheet. None of this works if your team is haphazardly dialing phone numbers. However, it can happen with auto-dialer software.
Cloud-based auto-dialers work from a predefined contact list and most easily integrate with today’s CRM systems. This means that customer data can immediately be uploaded into the CRM so your team can plan follow-ups.
2. Auto-dialer software increases talk time
Do you want your call center, sales, and customer service team to waste time manually dialing phone numbers? Do you want your team to waste their time dealing with voicemail? Of course not. That’s not what they’re paid for. Having them spend their time on these things will only decrease the effectiveness of your overall strategy.
Cloud-based auto-dialing systems do all that work on your team’s behalf. While your team is on the phone, the auto-dialing system makes multiple calls while filtering out unanswered calls. The sole purpose of the auto-dialer is to contact as many customers as possible and initiate communications with them.
Only after communications have been initiated are those calls passed to agents. This allows your agents to focus on the relationship and not dial random numbers. Auto-dialers have automatic call distribution, which means the software constantly distributes answered calls to agents.
By avoiding manual dialing, and only speaking to actual customers, your agents increase their talk time. This means they’re fully engaged with customers and able to provide the kind of support and service that leads to positive customer experiences.
3. Auto-dialer software increases agent productivity
Aside from increasing agent talk time, there are other features of auto-dialers that increase agent productivity. Features like call monitoring can be used by managers to gauge how effective individual agents are and whether the customer is interested or not. This means they can hear the conversation in real-time and gauge if the agent is handling the customer properly.
Call recording allows managers to sit down with agents and review the effectiveness of previously recorded calls. Managers can provide tips, guidance, feedback, and insight on what was done right and what needs to be improved. If contact rules need to be put in place for some contacts, the manager can easily do that through the auto-dialer software.
4. Provide relevant information
Your contact strategy would be a resounding success if every sale was closed — or every problem was resolved — on the first call, but that’s rarely the case. Oftentimes, your team will have to manage multiple follow-ups with customers along their journey. Many of these follow-ups will need to be done at different periods and not all of them will be performed by the same agent.
Each agent that handles a customer needs to access previous communications and messages. Preview dialers are a type of auto-dialerthat allows agents five to twenty minutes to review previous messages. This ensures they’re focused on personally relevant communications once they engage a returning customer.
5. Develop stronger communication
Customers don’t like having to bring up the same issue over and over again. They don’t want to keep talking about previous calls or chat about the same unresolved problems. Instead, they want to know they’re communicating with a knowledgeable agent who is on point and ready to serve.
Your strategy’s success depends on the consistency of your message. When customers reach an agent, and that agent is already updated on all the previous discussions, then customers come away impressed. They’re no longer frustrated and are simply happy to be dealing with a knowledgeable and helpful agent.
Powerful call center solutions from Ozonetel
Auto-dialer software can upgrade your outbound strategies by simplifying how your agents, sales, and customer service team reach customers. Your outbound call strategy will improve, your agents will become more productive, and you’ll generate more leads and have more opportunities to close.
Ozonetel is a full-service provider with multiple cloud-based auto-dialing solutions. We work alongside customers to improve how they contact, engage, and win over customers.
Ozonetel packs all the tools you could ever need to improve service levels within an affordable, easy-to-integrate, quick-to-set-up call center solution. Contact us to learn more.
