So a lot of Call Center folks (more specifically Operations) have constantly been trying to solve the profitability puzzle. I found out from many of them that as few as one sale per agent is made in 4 days, more so for domestic call centers!!! I mean if that doesn’t tell you what “rock-bottom” means, then I wonder what will.

The trouble is that even if you have the right processes and personnel in place, your technology distinguishes between the bad and the average, the average and the good, and the good and the greatest (Best-in-class as it is fondly called by some) when it comes to conversion rates.

Let’s say you have a great outbound process for an Airtel Campaign, in which your aim is to sell a prepaid connection that provides the best local calling rates, 100 odd SMSs free, but very high roaming and long-distance rates. Let’s throw in nominal GPRS and MMS services in there too.

Ad-hoc calling will not get you anywhere. But if you factor in the demographic data, and best time to call, you could inject some serious adrenaline in your campaign. Now it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that your best prospects would be either college going graduates, or retired folks (maybe) – more specifically, gossiping grandmothers, and college going girls (Let’s just face it, women talk a lot more than men. If you don’t believe me, look at the statistics). Also, you could target folks who are dating, but that’s not easy data to find. Professional people with desk jobs could also figure but then it’s hard to find job-profile related data. Field engineers, managers, executives, sales & Marketing, and support people are least likely to go with the kind of plan you are offering, ain’t that right? You could probably take more data into account but we’ll keep things simple here.

So you have created your targeted campaign from your lead list, if you are lucky enough to find the age group of people in there as well. So you put your 20 best salesmen in a nice little room with headsets and PC, a coffee machine in great condition, and get your dialer to start calling.

Assuming you have the right technology, you put a filter in place where 80% of the people you call are in the age bracket of 18-23 (Don’t forget that 50% of population in the India belongs in the “under 25” bracket). You allot 15% of the remaining for people between 55 & 63 and the rest for people over 63 You also create a filter in which 80% of people you call are women, and rest constitutes men (we just established that women talk more than men!). So this is what you essentially have.

·        64% – Women between 18-23 years of age

·        16% – Men between 18-23 years of age

·        12% – Women (retired/housewives) between 55 & 63

·        3% – Men (retired) between 55 & 63

·        4% – Women over 63

·        1% – Men over 63

To make it even more impactful, you also figure out that best times to call college folks is afternoon/evening times, let’s say 2 through 6 p.m, because they have classes in the morning (I am not going to factor in bunking). They would be more likely to actually hear your proposition when they are free – which boosts your conversion rates. For old folks, any time except early morning would be okay, afternoon and evenings may be best times.

So you have all this amazing intel, and it’s going to definitely boost your conversion rates. Now all you need is a dialer which enables you to do all this. In CC Technology lingo, we can call it “Rule-based Dialing”. It essentially denotes calling based on specific business rules instead of just ad-hoc predictive dialing.

Not too many dialers out there can actually do that. If you expect the Vicidial-based dialers to do this, you can snap back to reality just about now. What you need is a next generation technology which gives you the capability to translate all that well spent money on people, resources and infrastructure into generous profits. And of course convert your campaigns from good to great.

So instead of going for cheap, low-cost dialers with limited functionality, practically no scalability, extensibility or flexibility,  spend a little more on technology because that’s what’s going to distinguish your call center from average and BIC. You may be able to save some dough initially, but then only a great technology can essentially make your operations efficient. And you’d be surprised to know how soon you can actually get your complete return-on-investment within as little as one month (break even), and get ready to expand.

Thinking about it already? Watch out this space…