Use predictive dialers; you’ll increase agent productivity within your Call Centers.

If your employees are still manually dialing their telephones to contact customers, you're not driving maximum revenues per agent. Predictive Dialers have been used in world-class businesses for years to increase sales, live contacts, or collections – anywhere from 150% to 300%.

Predictive dialer, an automatic telephone dialing system that dials from a list of numbers and turns the call over to an agent when a human responds. It increases productivity in a call center, because the agents can spend their time talking rather than waiting for calls to go through as well as hanging up on busy signals and answering machines. The couple of seconds of pause you often hear when you answer a call from a telemarketer is the time it takes for the system to determine that you are a live person.

Predictive Dialers help in doubling the sales per hour per agent. A 50% increase in sales could give a 100% increase in profits.

The system predicts when agents will finish the current call, and the system will dial out another phone line while agents are still talking to customers. The phone call is passed to an agent instantly after a customer picks up the phone. It takes 30 seconds to manually dial a phone number and let it ring four times. If the customer doesn't answer the agent has to remember this and call the customer later.

But with a dialer, detection of disconnected phone numbers, or fax machines and passing only live calls saves a lot of agent’s time. The system allows the agent to talk to at least two people in the same time it takes to manually dial and reach one person and agent productivity increases by 150% to 400%.

Predictive Dialers help in saving management time too. The program maintains do not call lists, organizes data like sales, leads, call-backs etc. This can help agents to decide which times of day work best to call, finding the best lead etc.

Predictive Dialers help control leads. Once a number has been called by the system, it will remember what time the call was placed, outcome of the call, and will not call the customer again until asked to.

Predictive Dialers give a real-time feedback and the manager can monitor and maintain optimum performance and productivity.

The real-time displays give information about inbound queues, current status and statistics, dialer statistics, and list performance. It helps to identify agents who have exceeded preset goals, monitor and train an agent for immediate corrective action and feedback.

Predictive dialing removes the remedial tasks of manual dialing and frustration on not achieving the target calls and figures. It boosts the agent morale.

Most companies experience return of investment within six to twelve months.

Typical Features

Features of a hosted predictive dialer are generally derived from the hardware versions.

Outbound Calling

• Call List Management
• Answering Machine Detection
• VoIP/PSTN Blending
• Screen Pops Support
• Automated Caller ID
• Agent Worksheets and Scripts
  

Compliance

• Do-Not-Call Support
• Abandon Rate Management
• Call Recording and Playback
  

Agent Productivity

• Multi-Party Call Conferencing
• Call Transfer
• Call-Back Scheduling
• Session History
• Customer Lookups
• Remote Agent Support
• Agent Customization
• Live Internal Chat

Quality Management

• Training Mode
• Agent Monitoring
• ACD Status
• Agent & Campaign Statistics
• Performance Statistics

Reporting

• Call Log Reporting
• Campaign Reporting
• List Performance Reporting
• Agent Performance Reporting
• Disposition / Call Completion Reporting

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com/

IVR Technologies are perfect for businesses looking to boost their productivity and achieve cost savings.

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response, and represents software applications accessible from a telephone. Simply put, an IVR system lets callers obtain, exchange, or input information with a computer via touch-tone phone without a human intermediary. IVR systems automate the input and retrieval of information. IVR systems are perfect for businesses looking to Boost their productivity and achieve cost savings. Telnet uses innovative IVR solutions to supply its customers with easy-to-use interactive voice response applications.

IVR systems provide the basic software which allows the use of voice self services. In contrast to assisted services, which require the active involvement of a call center agent, IVR systems will pre-qualify the caller. This can be used to relieve the agent or to create a fully automated voice application. At the same time, they form the basis for call-center independent value added services such as ring tone downloads location-based services, lotteries or contests. IVR’s provide customers with 24-hour a day, 7-day a week access to business information and various services through a simple touch-tone telephone.

Below are just a few of the Industries were IVR application technologies are used.

Financial Industry: Tele Banking Solution, Mutual Funds, Credit Card Account information, Stock Trading, Financial Bank Transaction.

Call Centers: Call center employee screening, Customer satisfaction surveys, Client survey/questionnaire administration, Panel data collection.

Corporate Organization: Order entry and status, Training center, Automated Attendant, Call Centers

Education: Course Registration, Student Registration

Entertainment/Sports: Ticket Sales, Sports Schedule, Interactive TV, News Clipping

Government Organization: Vehicle Registration, Tax Office, Ticket Citation Payment

Health Care Organization: Appointments with Doctors, Clinical research surveys, Bed Checking, Time and attendance verification, Home Care Check-in

Manufacturing Company: Certification and Testing, Component availability, Order Entry and Status

Telephone Company: Third Party Verification, Conferencing, Cellular Feature Activation, Cellular Roaming, Line Testing

Transportation: Airline Fly Status, Airline Scheduling, Shipping line global checking

Retail: Dealer or Store Locator, Order and shipping tracking, Directory Assistance, Order Processing, Market Research (surveys and polls), order entry transactions

Telemarketing: Automated Dialers

IVR technology can support analog and digital telephone systems, although the latter can process many more calls at the same time. The voice board that processes each call has only between 2 and 24 ports in analog systems, but between 30 and thousands of ports when digital. Since the number of ports determines the number of simultaneous calls the system can handle, an analog system can only process a maximum of 24 calls at any given time.

Requirements for IVR Technology

1. Easy telephone access for clients
2. Affordable telephone charges for the client or MFI
3. Centrally-stored data accessible to the call flow application
4. Frequent data updates so clients can access accurate account information
5. Secured databases to prevent unauthorized phone-based access

Now a days IVR technology makes phone a powerful business tool for Organization, the simple telephone instrument becomes a powerful input/output device through which all kinds of transactions can be performed with assured security and data integrity.


Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com/

e-mail ! Most useful way of communication in respondents business.

Electronic mail (e-mail) is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving text messages, graphics, sound and video messages over electronic communication systems.

Email is now one of the fastest ways to gain or lose potential customers because of its ability to deliver information fast to an enormous amount of people. After sending an email you are no longer in control of the effects of the message and can only wait in suspense.

For example: an employee of your company started off his/her day in a bad mood. A potential customer emails them with a trivial question and they reply with a brash tone. Do you think that the recipient will use your company? On the Internet word travels fast. It takes me 3 minutes to send email to 50-100 people. Therefore your company can lose 100 current or potential customers with the brash email sent out by your employee. This can happen in a matter of minutes.

What's the difference between writing personal e-mails and business e-mails? Personal e-mails only represent you. Business e-mails, though, represent you and the company you work for. People who receive them not only form opinions about you but also about your company. So, business e-mails require careful writing, editing and proofreading.

Using Email Effectively:

Email is an effective means of communication for business and personal use but it also has some disadvantages.

Advantages are:

1. Email is effective in providing quick answers to yes and no, type questions.

2. Email is effective in finding the right person in an organization or company to answer your question.

3. Email is good to make appointments for busy people.

4. Email can distribute information quickly to many people for the time it takes to email one person.

The disadvantages are:

1. Email can become time consuming for answering complicated questions and misunderstandings can arise because cultural differences in the interpretation of certain words. The telephone is much better for providing detailed answers or if you feel that the question is not absolutely clear.

2. Email can compromise the security of an organization because sensitive information can be easily distributed accidentally or deliberately. Email should be entrusted to well trained and trusted staff members.

Email can become impersonal or misunderstood so consider these points:

1. Be concise and to the point.
2. Use proper spelling, grammar & punctuation.
3. Make it personal.
4. Use templates for frequently used responses.
5. Do not attach unnecessary files.
6. Use proper structure & layout.
7. Do not overuse the high priority option.
8. Do not write in CAPITALS.
9. Don't leave out the message thread.
10. Add disclaimers to your emails
11. Read the email before you send it.
12. Do not overuse Reply to All.
13. Mailings > use the Bcc: field or do a mail merge.
14. Take care with abbreviations and emoticons.
15. Be careful with formatting.
16. Take care with rich text and HTML messages.
17. Do not copy a message or attachment without permission.
18. Does not use email to discuss confidential information?
19. Use a meaningful subject.
20. Use active instead of passive.
21. Avoid using URGENT and IMPORTANT.
22. Avoid long sentences.
23. Don't send or forward emails containing libelous, defamatory, offensive, racist or obscene remarks.
24. Don't forward virus hoaxes and chain letters.
25. Keep your language gender neutral.
26. Don't reply to spam.
27. Use cc: field sparingly.

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com/

Call Center Technologies

Today, companies are recognizing that being able to deliver a high-quality customer experience through call center technology is of major strategic value to the organization. Technology has played a vital role in customer service outsourcing. Rapid advancements in information and communication technology have led to a boom in call centers across the world. Call centers use a variety of technologies to support contact with a customer.

Call centers have been aided by a range of telecommunications and computer technologies, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI), which allows the actions of the computer to be synchronized with what is happening on the phone. The latest internet technologies allow "virtual" call centers to be established across a company's telecommunications network without physically putting all the people in one office.

Technology is transforming the traditional call center, allowing staff to be in contact with customers in a number of different ways.

Technology Usage Level in Call Centers

Technology ----------------- Percent of respondents

1. Email -------------------------------------- 62

2. Voice response systems ----------------- 61

3. Quality monitoring systems ------------ 53

4. Computer telephone integration ------ 51

5. Call logging systems -------------------- 49

6. Contact Management tools ------------- 46

7. Workforce management tools --------- 43

8. Wallboards / reader boards ----------- 42

9. Advanced network services ------------ 38

10. Knowledge-base tools ----------------- 35

11. Predictive dialers --------------------- 18

12. Web-enabled call center -------------- 8

13. Multimedia queues ------------------- 13

14. VoIP ------------------------------------ 9

15. Speech recognition ------------------- 7


Finding the right technology is not an easy task, but the first steps must be to determine the organization's needs, and to link customers with the information and services they require quickly.

Various technology options are available to an outsourced customer service center and the selection of technology that will be used by the center needs to be done intelligently. That should provide the following six essential requirements:


1. Availability: The applications and services should be available during the specified time of operations. The system should also be available to the customers without making them wait for a long duration.

2. Manageability: The system should be easily reconfigurable and should enable the center to quickly customize the applications for any new services and scripts requested by the client.

3. Quality of Service: The voice and data services should be reliable and should have a pre-specified quality level.

4. Redundancy: There should be adequate protection against system failures and data loss. Adequate back-up plans in case of any system failures should be made so that the operations are not hampered.

5. Scalability: Modular increments in the system capacity should be feasible.

6. Security: Technologies used by the center should ensure prevention of loss and theft of client data.


Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team

Call Centers India Inc.

http://www.callcentersindia.com/