Seeing is believing for this home remodeling sales team that completed a trial of Convoso’s dialer and drove up contact rates almost 800%, while dramatically dropping agent wait time.
We interviewed Ray Pinnick, Director of Marketing at Marketing Center Inc., about his team’s successful trial and transition to the Convoso dialing system. He and Convoso Account Executive Janae Williams discussed the team’s dramatic turnarounds in contact rates, wait times, and agent morale.
Proof Is in the Trial: The Marketing Center Inc. Story
Their Challenges
- ReadyMode dialer delivers contact rates below 2%, leading to few sales appointments and stifled growth
- A lack of visibility into DID health causes many calls to appear as Spam and Scam Likely
- Poor connection and dialing rates lead to long agent wait times
- Agents struggling with low morale and a lack of calls
Our Solution
- Dialer trial to test solution and support team fit
- Powerful predictive dialer software
- Robust caller ID reputation management solution to monitor DIDs
- Dedicated CSMs to speed up onboarding and optimize configuration
- Skill-based routing delivers leads to the right agents
The Results
- Up to 800% increase in contact rates
- Agent wait times slashed by 2+ minutes
- Improved appointment-setting and sales opportunities
- Streamlined agent training process
- Improved agent morale and sales momentum
With ReadyMode, Easy Doesn’t Mean Effective
For Ray Pinnick, Director of Marketing Center Inc., there was clearly something standing in the way of his sales team’s success. Over the course of three years, he and his agents watched the problems with their ReadyMode dialer steadily mount.
Ray says that the dialer was easy to use, but it didn’t deliver the capabilities and performance his team needed to connect with leads and set appointments.
“ReadyMode was good because it was easy to use, but we weren’t connecting as we should have and a lot of [agents] were complaining that there weren’t enough calls.”
Without the ability to manage the health of caller IDs, more and more calls to consenting customers were being marked as possible spam and scams. Contact rates dropped below 2%. Connectivity issues were pushing average agent wait times up over 2 minutes—with 5- and even 10-minute waits not uncommon.
With morale and performance stagnating, and agents complaining about the lack of calls, Ray knew it was time to make a change.
Trial Leads to No-Brainer Decision to Switch
Searching for a solution, Ray came across several potential software options. But when you’re searching for a new dialer, you can’t just hit the pause button—you need to keep your sales operation running along.
Luckily, he got in touch with Janae Williams, Account Executive at Convoso. As Janae tells it,
“Ray and I connected when they were on ReadyMode. They were having problems with their DID health management. They had a very low contact rate and long wait times.”
Ultimately they decided that a trial was the most effective choice for Marketing Center Inc. to experience Convoso’s capabilities first hand.
A trial would give Ray’s team a soft transition by keeping their old data running on ReadyMode, while moving over 20 Marketing Center Inc. agents to test out the Convoso dialer’s performance.
This remodeling sales team knew what they wanted and had high expectations. Here’s how Janae described it in a call with Ray discussing their trial:
“You guys were crystal clear with what your KPIs are and what metrics would equal success for you – that was super helpful for us. So the Convoso team had to make sure that we were constantly aware of what success looks like for you as we were moving through the trial.
Especially because you didn’t just say, we have a 1.9% contact rate and we want it at 3% – you gave us a goal of 10%. And so we knew exactly what we were working with.”
Every day of the trial, the Marketing Center Inc. agents exceeded what had seemed like an ambitious target of increasing their contact rate by 5X.
And in the meantime, Ray says he and his team were able to understand the high level of hands-on service offered by Convoso’s dedicated customer support team.
By the end of the trial, the decision for Marketing Center Inc. to make a full switch to Convoso was an easy one.
Trial and Move to Convoso Drives up to 8X Contact Rate Increase
Marketing Center Inc. is far from the only outbound lead gen and sales team struggling with low contact rates.
Facing rampant call labeling and blocking issues, it’s only gotten harder for many businesses to get their customers on the phone. But with the ability to proactively manage the health of caller IDs, dialing teams can ensure that fewer calls show up as potential Spam—and that they make contact with their costly leads.
With ClearCallerID™, Convoso’s caller ID reputation management platform, Marketing Center Inc. now monitors the statuses of their DIDs across major carriers within one convenient dashboard. If a number is being blocked or flagged, they can quickly swap the number out and dial leads with a clean caller ID.
The Marketing Center combined smarter dialing strategies and skills-based call routing with ClearCallerID to power a massive increase in contact rates since switching to Convoso.
They came to Convoso with a 1.9% contact rate and watched that shoot up to 17% – that’s almost an 800% increase.
With more opportunities to talk to leads and set appointments, Marketing Center Inc. has unlocked many more chances to drive revenue with in-person project evaluations.
Predictive Dialing Efficiency Drastically Reduces Wait Times
In a high-volume call center like theirs, every second counts. When agents’ time is going unused because of poor connectivity and contact rates—with wait times as high as 10 minutes between calls—that’s simply payroll going straight out the window.
Using Convoso’s powerful predictive dialer, however, Marketing Center Inc. is able to dial more leads and reach them even faster with industry-leading speed to lead. When combined with a higher contact rate, Marketing Center is able to minimize wait times and keep agents in a groove.
Average wait times used to hover between 2 and 3 minutes. Today, they’re down to just 23 seconds. That’s over a 7X increase in active time.
Agents Experience New Highs in Commissions and Morale
All the sales momentum generated by the switch to Convoso was so strong that Marketing Center Inc. needed to retool its entire agent commission structure, which simply wasn’t designed with this level of performance as the norm.
Meanwhile, it isn’t just the bottom line that’s being boosted. Seeing more sales action and earning more commissions, morale among agents has reached new heights.
Asked whether life is better for his agents under Convoso, Ray simply says, “Oh, yeah. Definitely happier.”
CS Team Partnership Supports Optimization and New Ideas
When Ray and his team evaluated all their dialer options, the biggest thing they looked for outside of dialer performance was proactive customer support.
In Convoso’s dedicated implementation and CS teams, they’ve found partners with clear and consistent communication who are committed to their business’s success. As Ray puts it,
“The implementation team has been helping us, and they’re still helping us a lot, with understanding the system and providing us new avenues and giving ideas of ways to be better.
What’s more, this partnership is still in its early days. While the Marketing Center Inc. team is already utilizing many Convoso features, there’s still a range of performance boosting options that Ray has yet to leverage. But he’s looking forward to discovering them—along with the additional improvements they’ll bring to their KPIs.
“They will work with you. They want to find solutions for you. It’s been great so far.”
Get Dramatic Results for YOUR Call Center
Convoso is the ultimate dialer solution for sales and lead generation teams. Our outbound call center customers report dramatic increases in contact rates of up to 3X when they switch to our omnichannel contact center software, giving them higher conversions and significantly improved ROI.
The Convoso system works best with 20 or more seats, and scales efficiently to over 1,000 seats to meet enterprise-level requirements. See for yourself with a live demo how Convoso can help to boost the productivity of your outbound contact center operations.