A Guide to Preview Dialers & How They Enable Efficient, Consultative Sales
Prashanth Kancherla
Jul 21, 2023 | 8 mins read
For many industries, consultative sales are critical for growth. Unlike traditional sales processes, consultative sales is a less pushy approach that focuses on an open-ended conversation between the sales representative and their prospect. The representative asks more questions, thoroughly understands their prospects’ requirements, and acts as an advisor—guiding them to the right product or service to solve their pain point. Calls between the sales representative and the prospect are longer than in a typical telesales process and hinge upon excellent customer relationship management.
Typically, the auto industry, higher education, healthcare, insurance, and investment firms use this approach for sales.
For these firms to successfully scale up their business, it is essential to provide their team with the right tools and software. This includes using efficient dialers and implementing robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Preferably, the two software should work in tandem, to offer the sales representative a positive agent experience.
Moreover, dialers must be built for consultative sales. Power dialers and progressive dialers that are widely used by telemarketing teams will not work. While consultative sales teams do benefit from automated dialing, screen pops, and call logging, unlike telemarketing teams, they require more time between their calls to familiarize themselves with the prospect details and customize their pitch.
Preview dialers that are deeply integrated to their CRM software are ideal.
In this article, we will introduce you to the benefits of a preview dialer and how it works so that your business can reap benefits from preview dialing software.
What is Preview Dialer?
A preview dialer skims through the records of contact (CRM database) and picks a pre-screened contact that the agents can review before dialing. Agents can make an informed choice about calling the contact or rejecting the recommendation made by the preview dialer. This allows the outbound call center agents to pick contacts that are most likely to respond and act.
You must know that preview dialers are one of the fastest and simplest modes of outbound call center calling systems that accelerate consultative sales processes with one-click operation based on list management, targeted dialing, CRM analytics and historical data from the previous call or chat history. These dialers are generally a key component of a more holistic contact center solution.
Which Businesses Benefit from Preview Dialers?
Any business that wants to simplify its sales operations with a more targeted and CX-focused approach can use preview dialers.
Preview dialing is mostly used in B2B marketing and sales involving SaaS subscriptions, lead generation and fund-raising activities. It adds immense value to outbound sales campaigns of customer-centric companies in education, airlines, finance and hospitality industries.
Benefits of Preview Dialers
With a preview dialer, you can automate your outbound calls and better organize how your team communicates with prospects and clients. Let’s take a look at the benefits of preview dialer system.
Improved Customer Satisfaction Levels
On average, only 39% of calls dialed by outbound call centers are answered by customers. Preview dialers can increase the speed and quality of outbound calls made to customers. This is based on extremely potent data to reach customers who seek a quicker resolution of their problems and want personalized attention from skilled and professional customer service agents.
Reduced Dropped Calls
Agents can immediately connect with the customer that the software recognizes as a good prospect without any delay. This means reduced instances of dropped calls for the contact center. Reduced agent idle time is another advantage.
Better Outreach
Agents can intelligently dial in only those numbers that they feel confident about converting into sales. Using enriched outreach data, preview dialers can increase the success rate of outbound sales calling efforts by more than 400% compared to manual dialing.
Effective Lead Management
Another advantage of using preview dialers in a contact center is efficient and effective lead management. Agents can use call data to refine the existing database and remove or update leads based on their calling process.
How Does a Preview Dialer Function?
Preview dialers are used in contact centers that handle a limited number of calls, mostly ranging between 50 and 100 contacts. Typically, these companies sell complex, high-value products such as insurance schemes, higher education packages, or automobiles. These companies would generally have a high-value database or contact list.
There are five critical steps involved in the preview dialing system. These are:
Critical Steps in Preview Dialing
- Handover of sales-qualified leads
- Reviewing contacts using filters and recommendations
- Activating dial-in features
- Closing the call
- Dialing next lead
Step 1: Handover of Sales-qualified Leads
The first step involves handing over sales-qualified leads to qualified agents. These agents, often known as advisors or counselors, have excellent communication skills and product knowledge. The first step for businesses looking to scale up is to automate the process through which the contacts of these leads are shared with the consultative sales teams.
Step 2: Reviewing Contacts Using Filters and Recommendations
In this next step, we see the main purpose of choosing a power dialer, over other auto dialers. Here, agents, once they receive the contacts list, begin to pre-screen each contact individually and collect as much information as possible before setting up their call. Typically, businesses set a time between 10-30 minutes between calls, depending on the product or service they sell. The time you decide should be sufficient for agents to close the previous call, read the customer case history, and prepare themselves for their conversation.
At this stage, the agent can view which prospect is going to be called and view their case history. They can accept or decline the call at this point.
Step 3: Activating Dial-in Features
The preview dialer software automatically dials the contact number. After the call is dialed, two possibilities arise:
- Possibility 1: The contact answers the agent’s call
- Possibility 2: The contact doesn’t answer the agent’s call
If the contact does not answer, this call will be rescheduled as per predefined rules (typically after a few hours, or another day) and the preview dialer will dial the next contact on the sales representative’s list. If the call does go through, the sales rep moves to the next step which is: having the conversation and closing the call.
Step 4: Closing the Call
Based on the contact’s availability, the agent would carry out a personalized conversation with the prospect. Depending on the industry and the prospect these calls could last anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes. After the call, there may be some after-call work, where the agent schedules the next call or adds in some notes or predefined call dispositions.
Step 5: Dialing Next Lead
Once the call is completed with the first contact, the preview dialer automatically dials the next call after the stipulated time period between calls is over.
This simple workflow allows consultative sales teams to adequately prepare before each call and personalize their conversations while automating operations. A consultative sales conversation is not longer than a typical telemarketing conversation, and it also requires the agent to be in the correct fram of mind. A single conversation can be tiring, and companies should factor this in if they want to deliver a stellar sales experience.
Companies should also consider how else they can streamline processes so that the sales teams can focus on what they do best, that is converse with prospects, build relationships, and close deals. The right kind of preview dialer can help enable this streamlined sales experience for the sales team and the prospects.
Features of the Best Preview Dialer Software
Preview dialer features may vary based on your contact center software provider. Top vendors offer advanced AI-powered agent assignments and features to improve the overall call center experience for agents.
Based on our analysis of the industry, we have listed the top five fundamental features of preview dialer software.
Key Features of Preview Dialer Software
- CRM Integration
- Live Monitoring
- Reports & AI-based Analytics
- Answering Machine Detection
- Call Recordings
1. CRM Integration
This feature allows the preview dialing software to skim through the contact database, mostly a CRM. The call dashboard open within the CRM software, and the agent does not need to toggle between software during their calls.
2. Live Monitoring
Live monitoring dashboards enable call center managers to track ongoing calls, campaign performance, and agent performance with ease. Managers can support their sales representatives with more information using the ‘whisper’ and barge-in’ feature.
3. Reports & AI-based Analytics
Apart from the live dashboards, managers can access multiple reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to assess agent and campaign performance They can use AI-based speech analytics to monitor every single conversation and highlight prospect sentiment of agent training needs.
4. Answering Machine Detection
Sales teams lose 10 to 15 seconds on each call that goes unanswered or is answered by an answering machine, leading to a cumulative loss in productivity. Advanced preview dialers have an in-built answering machine detection function that quickly disconnects the call if it is answered by an answering machine. This way, sales teams can save up to 70% of their time and effort.
5. Call Recordings
Call recordings are a vital feature for sales teams. Ensure that the preview dialer you choose can record and store your call recordings securely for quality, training, litigation, and compliance purposes.
Additionally, a good preview dialer vendor would continually update their software with the latest technology. For instance, sales teams could benefit from Generative AI-based neural-knowledge management to find information faster or a WhatsApp integration that could enable them to follow up with prospects on WhatsApp.
Conclusion
Well trained, well-informed sales representatives are the cornerstone of a successful consultative sales strategy. An advanced preview dialer automates your sales workflow letting your sales team focus on what they do best: make a highly persuasive pitch to prospects who favor brand that ensure excellent experiences at every step of the journey.
Interested in learning more about how an advanced preview dialer can help your sales team? Contact Ozonetel’s expert team here for a demo on how to simplify and scale your consultative sales process.
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Frequently Asked Questions
A preview dialer automatically selects customers based on previous records, call list and the center’s outbound campaign settings, and recommends them to the agent. It helps the agent to call better prospects and preview information about them before deciding whether to make the call or not.
No, power and preview dialers are different from each other.
The basic difference lies in the way a power dialer sets up the next call as soon as the previous call ends.
In the preview dialer, agents are given a preview of the contact’s information in a screen pop-up, or in their CRM, before they place the call. Here, the agents have the liberty to review customer/prospect information to prepare themselves before the call. Power dialers dial out calls fast with barely a 1 to 5-minute interval between calls.
Preview dialer systems can be installed either as a standalone software suite or as part of the complete cloud-based contact center software.
Firstly, you must know if your contact center software has a preview dialer feature. If yes, then set up your outbound call campaign and select ‘preview dialer’ from amongst the dialer options.
