Outbound contact centers focus mainly on sales – to interest new prospects in your products or services, or to renew, cross-sell, or upsell existing customers. Either way, outbound contact centers are dynamic, fast-paced environments where every second counts.
By connecting your phone system to your CRM, InGenius computer telephony integration (CTI) software enables your reps to increase their call volume and to reach the customer at the right time, when they are ready to buy. Both elements are needed to create a successful outbound call center.
The challenge in making the right connection at the right time is a real one. Imagine a customer is met by dead air on the line while waiting to be connected. This could lead to their hanging up and not even hearing about your offer or worse still, blocking calls from your number, seeing it as an inconvenience.
The flip side of this would be agents waiting on unanswered calls, engaged, or discontinued numbers, all of which wastes valuable time as they could be talking to an available customer.
Optimizing this process is key to delivering results
InGenius helps customers with this very challenge: connecting agents to customers with outbound calling routed through Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE), and Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE).
Being able to load outbound calling lists and connecting an available agent to a customer is the basic functionality of an outbound CTI app. What more can be done to make it a seamless experience for both customers and agents?
Preview Dialing
One of the features available in InGenius Connect for call centers using Cisco UCCE or Cisco PCCE is Preview Dialing. As the name suggests, Preview Dialing can be set up to allow the agent to see details about the customer before initiating the outbound call.
There are multiple use cases where this would be beneficial. Take, for example, a sales team that works in a different time zone. The campaign list pushed to the dialer may not include data to differentiate what would be the best time to call or if the customer has requested not to be contacted at certain times of day. Giving the agent the ability to see this type of customer information before initiating the call could give the interaction a better chance of success by not contacting them when they are unavailable.
Another use case would be sales organizations with seasonal ramp up to take on new agents for specific campaigns. Where an experienced agent will have the knowledge they need to have a focused conversation, a newer colleague may need a quick check to understand what they need to communicate to the next customer. Allowing them a short period of time to set themselves up before dialing would give the customer a more confident agent to speak to, instead of someone who sounds new and panicked at the start of the call. Think about it, when was the last time you bought a product from an inbound call where the agent didn’t sound confident?
Predictive Dialing
Another feature that is available for organizations using Cisco UCCX is Predictive Dialing with Finesse (coming to Cisco UCCE / Cisco PCCE in our next release).
Predictive Dialing eliminates the time wasted for calls that go through to engaged or discontinued lines as well as automated or unanswered calls. In this mode, the call is only pushed to the agent if the call has been answered by the customer. This time savings means that agents get to speak to customers instead of having to update a call log to say they were not able to get through, giving them more opportunities to win additional business from your customers and prospects.
An outbound dialing success story
InGenius is tried and tested in the outbound sales world with many customers using it as their preferred connector between their Cisco phone system and CRM.
In the case of 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty, they saw a 375% increase in the number of outbound interactions they could make by using InGenius CTI to integrate their Cisco telephony and Salesforce CRM. Before using InGenius, agents were able to make around 20 calls a day. This increased to 100+ calls per agent per day after deploying InGenius.
While Preview Dialing and Predictive Dialing are great features for outbound dialing teams, the other features in InGenius also benefit agents. From reducing the number of misdials by using click to dial, to being available for the next call more quickly by using automated call logging, InGenius has been designed to make customer service interactions as efficient as possible.
If you would like to know more about how InGenius can connect your Cisco UCCX, Cisco UCCE, Cisco PCCE phone systems to your CRM and elevate your outbound dialing success, contact the InGenius team and we will be happy to explain how we can help.