Businesses these days rely heavily on conducting customer interactions via phone calls. Sales agents of various organizations have to manually make calls to a large number of customers. A calling campaign is usually implemented to interact with customers, to let them know of the latest products and offers launched by the business, and to get their feedback. This is a structured plan for contacting prospects and having one-on-one conversations between agents and customers. Other than telemarketing and feedback, this may also include customer support and audience research as its purpose.

Traditionally, sales professionals used to manually dial contact numbers from a vast, pre-loaded database to conduct a calling campaign. Once done dialing the numbers, agents had to wait for the call to connect. In this kind of process, sometimes the dialed number may go wrong or the call might reach the answering machine. Due to the lack of a filtering process in the case of outbound calls, manual dialing has proved to be inefficient in conducting modern, large-scale calling campaigns. For this reason, businesses have started to move towards implementing power dialers and power call facilities for modern call campaigns. Power dialers provide sales agents with an automated dialing system that helps to make a large number of calls without the least manual hassle, boosting productivity and overall growth of the business.

Comparing manual and power dialing methods: Which is best for enhanced growth?

There are many reasons why traditional, manual dialing operations in sales prove ineffective for the growth of the business in the long run. Manual dialing involves great risks of mistakes in dialing, and discrepancies in records and quality. On the other hand, automated power dialers and power call facilities ensure the maximum conversion of leads as a lot of customers can be contacted in a very short period. Let us see the differences between manual and power dialing methods and how each affects the growth of businesses:

1. Faster Tool- Manual dialing allows agents to manually enter basic information about clients and dial their contact numbers. This information can include names of the callers, reminders for appointments, call dispositions, and other notes. When collected, all this information is used to monitor the performance of agents concerning recordings of calls already made, wrap-up time of each call, and logging details. This may prove useful in the case of outbound call centers where a lot of information has already been processed before dialing the numbers. Manual dialing is also preferred in the case of highly secure CRM integrations as a result of various IP policies.

On the other hand, power dialers can automate and expedite the dialing process by agents. Automatic software for dialing significantly helps to increase time spent in talking with clients and reduces idle time spent between calls. The latter is made possible as power dialers automatically start dialing the next number as soon as one call ends. This ultimately improves customer experience and thereby helps in growth by helping the agents focus on more high-quality tasks.

2. Better Insights- Unlike manual dialers, power dialers can help in conducting automated call campaigns. This helps in identifying qualified leads based on the prospect’s responses. These can be easily uploaded to a PC once the campaign is initiated. 

Automated call campaigns can provide various real-time analytics along with call recordings to help assess agents’ performance and impose quality-control measures if needed.

3. Reduce Inactivity- Power dialers can handle a large number of calls in a very short period, along with available agents, to use information gathered from calls for the growth of the business.

Manual dialing may involve dialing and redialing busy signals, tedious manual search for numbers, wrongly dialed entries or reaching answering machines. Automated power dialers usually come with answering machine detection to automatically start recording voicemails when needed. 

4. Targeted Campaign- Automated software can handle large-scale calling campaigns much more efficiently than manual dialing methods. It can access customer information before dialing. This boosts productivity and increases the dialing rate. Customer information is also effectively managed with the help of CRM integration, which is done manually with traditional methods.

Conclusion:

Manual dialing involves tedious checking and re-checking of the database to correctly enter one number, waiting for the call to connect, and running risks of wrong dialing. This proves disadvantageous in the case of large-scale calling campaigns. On the other hand, power dialers can automate the entire process of dialing with productive CRM integration, boosting productivity and propelling businesses toward growth.