Customer Relationship Management software has become an integral part of many types of businesses, and is especially important for companies using dialers.
Dialers mean large contact databases, and many phone reps who must then manage this information throughout the sales process.
CRM software handles numerous tasks, from scheduling appointments to organizing contact details and taking notes for follow-up.
A CRM solution for your company will provide automated processes, direct communication with customers and tools for easily analyzing customer data.
Dialers are generally limited to being a piece of hardware which makes and routes calls.
There are several main types of dialers, but the superior choice by far, for B2B (business-to-business) calling, is a power dialer.
This dialer calls only one number at a time, yet heightens productivity and lowers costs by saving leads from the waste that occurs with other types of dialers.
Predictive dialers, for example, dial several numbers at once, with the hope that there will be enough reps available to take the calls by the time they are answered.
This leaves the phone reps rushed and less well-prepared, while also allowing many leads to be lost to over-dialing.
By integrating the CRM software with a power dialer, productivity is boosted further and the way calls are taken and managed is lifted to an even higher level of service and functionality.
By using an incorporated system like this, the phone reps have a more efficient way of doing their job.
Instead of jumping between two systems, and having to transfer information from the dialer system to the CRM system they are automatically coordinated.
There are several companies now offering hosted dialers with integrated CRM.
This is an innovative way to make dialers available to smaller businesses or ones without the funding to buy a whole dialer.
In 2007, MIT researcher Dr.
James Oldroyd launched a study into how best to manage the response time to leads collected from web-forms.
This study clearly shows that there are gaps in the way most companies approach lead response management.
Integrating CRM software with a power dialer is one great way to start optimizing lead response management.