How I wish the opera company had a telephone dialer!

When I was in seventh grade I was "volunteered" to help the Opera Company in my home town with their fundraising one spring. I was given several pages of names and phone numbers. These people had previously donated in the past. My responsibility was to call each of them and give them the pitch I was taught. The fundraising was fairly successful; most of the people I was calling were repeat contributors. But what I remember is sitting in the kitchen, my cheek flat against the table top, bored out of my mind looking up, then dialing, then sitting through ring after ring after ring. At least a third of the messages went to voicemail and then I had to clumsily come up with a message that would get these people to call me back. I only ever got through half of my list, I gave up before I finished.

While a seventh grader may not be the best comparison for a professional sales agent, the symptoms I experienced may not be dissimilar to those experienced by call center reps. Sales agents who manually dial through lists of contacts often experience a high degree of job burnout. This leads to slower job completion and lower job quality. The potentially monotonous tasks associated with remote sales may also increase the number of employees who are actively seeking different employment. This leads to a higher number of employees quitting soon after they complete their job training. These companies are losing money a lot of money.

Simple telephony tools dramatically reduce these problems by removing the busywork from remote sales. The flagship solution is the telephone dialer. Dialers are software solutions that automatically dial through a list of leads or contacts. They remove one of the largest time wasters from remote sales, manually dialing. Besides reducing the amount of time spent looking up and dialing numbers they also increase the number of people each sales agent is able to talk to in a day. Sales would already become a lot less monotonous.

Dialers also offer software solutions to reduce the time dealt with unanswered calls and voice mail. Many dialers allow pre-recorded messages to be saved for future use. Some dialers allow these messages to be broadcasted through the dialer to the numbers called. Contacts who answer the phone can then choose to speak to a live agent. Alternatively some dialers call through a list of names, and only patch through to the live agent when calls are answered. In this scenario the prerecorded message is left to those numbers where a voice message system picks up. A third alternative is a dialer that patches every call to the agent before it is answered. The agent can then opt to move on to another call while the dialer leaves the prerecorded message when voice mail is encountered.

There are many different variations of telephone dialers. Each serves to speed the sales process, increase sales, and make the sales process more enjoyable for sales agents. It is worth the time and attention of any remote sales organization to look into which kind of dialer would work best for them.