Running a call centre is hard. From campaign strategy to agent performance and taking care of technology, there’s a huge amount to take care of every single day. It’s no surprise that sometimes people miss the basics of best practice.
As one of the more experienced hosted dialler providers, we’ve seen the traits that the most successful outbound contact centres have in common – and the pitfalls that are easy to fall into when you’re trying to keep your campaigns running.
Drawing on that experience, here are five of the most common mistakes that we see outbound contact centres making – and how you can avoid them.
1. Focusing on quantity, not quality
At the most fundamental level, we all want to make sure our agents are motivated and performing at their best. In that sense, it’s crucial to keep an eye on the number of calls that are being made and how many people you’re actually reaching.
However, this drive for agent performance can sometimes distract you from the fact that ‘more calls’ isn’t the only way to make your campaigns a success. It’s useful to look at what your hosted dialler is telling you in its reports – you could identify trends like a spike in unanswered calls around certain times of the day.
In these instances, smart call centres rethink their planning and strategy rather than simply increasing call rates in hope of more contacts.
2. Using out-of-date lists
A dialler is only as good as its data. There’s nothing worse than investing your time, money and workforce into calling unqualified or unreachable contacts for hours on end.
In part, it’s about carefully vetting your data sources so you can be confident the data you’re receiving is up-to-date. Dialler reporting can help you assess how data is performing as you call it, which should inform your decision about using the same data provider again.
At the same time, it’s important to understand that data is always going stale – even as you are calling it. While the best hosted diallers will help you get more use out of a list and recycle leads for as long as possible, you should always be ready to call it a day and move onto new lists.
3. Not listening to call recordings
For the sake of compliance, most call centres have amassed gigabytes of recordings that are stored on-site or remotely. Frustratingly, these aren’t always used to improve performance – in some cases because they’re hard to filter, search, and sort day-to-day.
When you choose a call centre dialler, be sure that you’ll get a simple, intuitive interface for working with call recordings. Then, set some time aside to delve into these recordings regularly – not just when there’s a problem you need to investigate.
4. Missing the multichannel opportunity
Responding to demand from consumers, few call centres have truly avoided becoming multichannel. Email, live chat and SMS is increasingly becoming part of the standard call centre setup – but that’s not the same as embracing the opportunity that’s available.
A half-hearted step into becoming a multichannel contact centre often adds insurmountable admin, time-consuming management, and needless complexity as agents struggle to deal with multiple interfaces and platforms. Today’s most successful contact centres are using consolidated, centralised platforms for every single channel – and that’s a trend that looks set to continue in the coming months and years.
5. Lacking essential support by prioritising cost
Finally, the results-driven environment of a call centre puts a significant pressure on cost. Every call centre manager knows that if they can reduce their spend on technology and call rates, campaigns need to do less to become profitable.
However, prioritising low costs over quality typically means sub-par service, from slow technical support to unreliable systems. While cost should always be a consideration, your choice of predictive dialler should strike the balance between affordability and quality.
Discover a hosted dialler that’s both cost-effective and capable.
Visit at https://www.hostcomm.co.uk/solutions/hosted-predictive-dialler