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If you’re trusting your auto dialer call quality to standard dialer routes, are you aware of what you could be risking?

For the 40 million tourists who visit Las Vegas each year, a stop at the casino is almost mandatory, where even the most risk-averse people are tempted to drop a dollar into the slot machine, try a hand of blackjack, or place a bet on the roulette wheel. Conservative roulette players may choose to put a chip on odd or even, or red or black, since they know that their chances of winning are close to 50%. More adventurous players will put their chips on individual numbers, knowing that if the ball within the spinning wheel lands on their number, they’ll hit it big with the 35-to-1 payout. We suspend our disbelief or our better judgment in the hope that fortune smiles on us, weighing risk vs. reward.

If you’re running a call center, the idea that your agents are spinning a roulette wheel each time the dialer connects with a lead would be alarming. But if your SIP provider doesn’t make allowances to ensure that each call flows through a premium route, you are exposing your business to the risk of bad connections, call drops, and the general perception that your operation isn’t trustworthy. And the odds of converting a prospect under these conditions are nearly incalculable.

Pump up the Volume

The rise of the auto-dialer has given sales teams a powerful tool to ensure that they are maximizing their time on the phone. Agents aren’t forced to waste precious minutes trying to decide who to dial or sitting idly while call after call goes to voicemail or rings endlessly. The auto-dialer is a sales servant, allowing each agent to focus on making a great impression and forging a bond with their customer.

But telecom carriers often see your high-volume, short-duration calls in a different light. It’s a lot of work to connect, maintain, and terminate these calls, and they’re more interested in making sure that their conversational traffic doesn’t suffer. So, they reserve their premium routes for conversational traffic and push their dialer traffic to standard routes, where your agents’ calls are fighting for bandwidth with video downloads, e-mail, and other typical causes of network congestion.

Gambling on Standard Routes

Providers who can’t guarantee that your agents’ calls will be carried on premium routes expose your business to risks that impact your bottom line.  And these are unnecessary risks to run.

The first issue is that calls on standard routes have a lower chance of connecting and a higher call drop rate. Our research shows that the use of premium dialer routes can result in a 15% boost in connect rates, since:

1. Many carriers are like travel agents who tell you that they can book a trip for you anywhere in the world—and even provide pricing—but have no intention to help you realize your dream to visit New Zealand. If your carrier won’t help you connect with prospects in new regions or markets, your connection rates will suffer.
2. Standard routes are significantly more fragile than premium routes, which leads to drop after drop.

Of course, making and maintaining that connection is only half the battle. The quality of that call is often what makes the biggest impact on the customer. But if your agents are engaging with leads on standard routes, where the audio streams are polluted with static, digital debris, and (worst of all) silence, customers are going to assume that your operation isn’t dependable, which will sabotage your conversion rates.

As call center operators, we often worry about customer satisfaction metrics.  But the switch to premium dialer routes also dramatically increases agent satisfaction, which, in turn, has a positive impact on retention and performance. When agents don’t have to worry about the technology failing them during crunch time, they can focus on relationship building and stay in the selling zone. And one nontrivial byproduct of this success is that you won’t have to devote every waking hour to finding and training new agents to replace those who walk away because they can’t trust the tools of the trade.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful businesses often comes down to the ability to reduce and mitigate risk. If a company said that they were going to invest money in a plan to try and win millions playing roulette in Vegas, they would be laughed out of existence. But if your call center is running on standard dialer routes, your agents are playing roulette with every dial of the phone. And the odds are stacked against them.

Contact us today to learn more about how premium dialer routes can improve call quality and boost conversion rates.

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