In our interview with One Health Direct VP of Sales Jesse Daniels, he shared their challenging journey over the three years prior to switching to Convoso. We’re delighted to bring you their story, and the dramatic improvement of their outbound call center's performance in just one month.

“Convoso – I can't even express what a difference it's made.”

One Health Direct is a nationwide company with over 500 employees, serving multiple markets in the healthcare industry. They help clients grow revenue share with customer acquisition, marketing, and management in the healthcare field. The call center outreach for One Health Direct carries over a million calls per day, running several campaigns simultaneously. The demand for productivity is strong.

When the VP of Sales Jesse Daniels looked back on the company’s experience before Convoso, he described a continuous frustration that they couldn’t crack the issues that were building to crisis proportions. Their monthly expense for leads was high, but their sales results were not compensating. It just wasn’t making sense. They weren’t sure what to do.

“Every day I would look at the numbers, and I would know that it wasn't my agents. I knew that my team was great, but we just couldn't figure out how to take that next step. I truly believed in what we had here, in the products, in the people and all those things that you need to check off–we had them all.”

Before discovering Convoso, One Health Direct used dialers from both VICIdial and Five9. Productivity and expense troubles included excessive answering machine dispositions, blocked calls, calls flagged for spam risk with no way to identify the local caller ID, high DID costs, and bandwidth issues limiting campaign capacity.

“With Convoso, I run a test on the DID once a week [to check for spam issues] and I change out maybe 20 DIDs and it's $20 as opposed to thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars every month, like when we were on VICIdial and Five9.”

With the promise of a major call center software provider, One Health Direct began using the Five9 product in 2017. Jesse explained that the problems began shortly after when “spam likely started showing up on cell phones.” Their outbound calls were getting disconnected by the carriers.

“Five9 didn't have any solutions for us to address the spam likely for our DIDs. We can make up to a million dials a day sometimes, and our DIDs were going to spam likely very quickly.”

One Health Direct operates with a local call presence throughout their campaigns, so they require local phone numbers – one number for every area code in the US. Five9’s solution to the spam issue was to replace the entire block of 350 DIDs since they couldn’t determine which numbers within that block were bad. It got to be very expensive.

“When we were on Five9 towards the end, this is going to seem crazy, but I was carrying almost $20,000 a month in DIDs just so we could try to contact people.”

Their costs also included paying renewals on those DIDs every month, charges for minutes as well as long distance, and dialer fees per seat.

To help with the call blocking and flagging, Five9 suggested that One Health Direct hire one of their technical account managers (TAM). Additionally, they were encouraged to sign up for another service to check DIDs for spam, so that expense added to the total.

Despite these financial investments, the efforts didn’t make a significant difference. They weren't seeing improvements, and yet they were spending more and more money for extra services.

"As more and more of these carriers jumped on to the Scam Likely deal, it just started getting worse and worse for us. So we had to make a quick decision to get off Five9.”

Nothing kills contact rates like not reaching leads. Which is exactly what happens when the agents keep encountering voicemail and answering machines. Agent productivity nose dives.

It’s a fact - people let some incoming calls pass through, electing not to answer because they can’t take the call at the moment or don’t want to take the call. Whatever the reason, any call center making outbound sales and lead generation calls needs to factor in a certain percentage of calls lost to voicemail.

But not 70% of your calls.

If your agents are dispositioning that many calls to answering machines, you’ve got a serious issue. They’re not having conversations. They’re not selling. You’re losing money.

When they reviewed agent productivity, One Health Direct's call center managers found that very little of the agent’s day was spent actually using the skill set they’re being paid for – talking on the phone to prospects. And there were other related issues with softphones, tech issues, headset issues, in addition to so many voicemails coming through.

“Another one of the big issues that we had with Five9, and then leading into VICIdial as well, was the answering machine detection. It was very inaccurate. Our agents were spending about 70% of their day coding for answering machines. It was very, very unproductive.”

On both Five9 and VICIdial, running campaigns was limited. When they had four or five campaigns running at one time, the dialers always seemed to bog down. They had these issues with a lot of disconnected numbers, voice issues, and sound issues with the dialer and the softphone.

Jesse said his company pays him over six figures to be the VP of Sales, but with the Five9 system, once a week he was taking a full eight hours of his day to just do data entry.

With Five9, he would order a block of DIDs, and it would take about 48 hours to get them. Once he got the DIDs, he had to change out the whole block. He says, "A company as big as Five9 still has this type of technology happening and I would have to go in and add each DID manually: the phone number, for example, you put in the area code first and then the phone number, and then the next number and then the next number."

“It would take me a full work day. And the problem is I know how important the DID are, so I didn't feel comfortable delegating it to someone else, because I knew that if they did something incorrectly, it could bring our whole outbound dialing operation down.”

When One Health Direct realized in the middle of 2018 that they needed to make a rapid clean break from Five9, they went with a dialer they knew they could set up quickly, and that was VICIdial. They didn’t have time for due diligence to search the market for a new dialer.

They knew VICIdial was a short term fix. and they were looking for something else.

"We had done a lot of research and a lot of demos with some of the larger companies. There's so many, I can't even remember them at this point. But none of them really had the solution that we were looking for.”

One Health Direct opted for a side-by-side trial comparison of Convoso and VICIdial with almost identical data. On the first day, the agents who were still on VICIdial coded about 5,200 answering machines through about six hours. And almost identical data, the same amount of agents that were on Convoso did about a third of that in the same amount of time and for that same six-hour period.

“The answering machine detection on Five9 and VICIdial were not good. So many answering machines got through to the agents.”

“When we were on VICI towards the end, we were having a little bit of a turnover issue because we would bring agents in and the first two weeks that they were here, they weren't getting a lot of contacts. We're selling them in the interview that you're going to be able to make this much money, and this is how many sales you should be getting a day. And then they sit here and don't talk to anybody all day long. And they were leaving. They were saying, ‘I'm not going to be able to make a living on answering machines all day.’”

Since switching their dialer to Convoso's solution, One Health Direct has been able to keep their call center humming with robust campaigns that generate more agent conversations so they can convert more leads. Sales are up by a third. Agents and managers are earning record commissions.

“Convoso has been such a game changer for us.”

Here's a little story Jesse shared about how they ended up with Convoso as their third dialer after researching and getting demos for a year with much larger contact center software companies.

“We were looking for AI. We thought an AI bot fronting for us might be the solution to the spam and for not making so many calls, and for filtering out some of the answering machines.

“We saw your ad for conversational AI. And my COO came and talked to me and said, ‘Hey, I was talking to this company about AI and they said they have a dialer as well.’ And he told me they said they do this well, and they do that well.

“And I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, they all say they do that well. And they all say they have Tier-1 carriers and yada, yada, yada.’

“So he was like, ‘No, I really think you should talk to these guys.’ And begrudgingly, I said, ‘Sure.’ And I walked down to his office and jumped on the demo call with them.

“Dylan was our sales guy. And I'll tell you what, I've been in sales a long time, and Dylan had me sold pretty quickly. He was absolutely fantastic. I told him what our issues were and what we really needed to fix for our business to grow and he addressed them.

One Health Direct has dramatically increased connections with leads since switching to Convoso’s dialer. Rotating caller IDs is just one of the solutions that has helped to boost contact rates, putting agents into live conversations.

The contact rate for One Health Direct is now considerably higher than it ever was with Five9or VICIdial. A big credit goes to the fact that they were able to rotate their DIDs.

So, they are making more sales now, but they’ve also lowered their costs considerably.

“We're at about three grand right now for our DIDs on Convoso’s dialer, compared to $20,000 with the other two dialers. Convoso is almost free to us if you just take out the fact that we don't have to pay for those DIDs any longer.”

Jesse is pleased that they are now able to run all of their campaigns, four and five at a time. They’re running double the number of campaigns than on previous dialers, while using fewer DIDs. That's some savings.

“I'm not seeing any quality loss when it comes to the sound for the agents, or disconnects, or any of that sort of stuff we used to have issues with,” Jesse added. “That’s probably the first thing we noticed [after switching to Convoso]. The next thing would be the answering machine detection and the accuracy of it.”

“We have the same exact data, pretty much the same agents – nothing has changed really except for the dialer. And our sales have gone up just about a third.”

On the previous dialers, the call center agents spent most of their time NOT talking to prospects, for the various reasons mentioned above. When Jesse's team got on Convoso's dialer, answering machine detection improved. With lead management tools like rotating the DIDs, the agents connected to more prospects. This boost in contact rates allowed the One Health Direct agents to do what they do best – have conversations that convert to sales.

In fact, they more than doubled their commissions within their first month with Convoso, hitting a record high.

“My veteran agents that are here, 100%, see a major difference in Convoso over any other dialer we've used because of the cost. Their sales are, their commissions are higher than they've ever been.

“So agent-wise they love it. And another thing that I'm noticing when I walk through the office in the morning, and if I go out there right now, the morale in the room and the energy in the room is just better than it's ever been. I don't hear as much complaining, I don't see the sour faces.”

With Five9 and VICIdial, Jesse’s management team used to build a KPI report every morning to show sales and revenue per hour and other metrics. Now they can pull in the metrics they need automatically into Convoso’s customizable dashboard. When you’re talking about a high salary manager saving an hour and a half of their day with auto generated reports, that drives manager efficiency and contributes to call center ROI.

Simplified tech issues have saved money for the company as well, especially for their agents who work from home.

“With Five9 it was very difficult because they had to install a softphone and they had to install Java and all this other software...Now [with Convoso] they log into the website and it's done. There's no softphones or downloads or anything like that.

"So our company is saving a bunch of money on our tech support.”

Jesse told us they’ve experienced very little down time with Convoso, especially in contrast to more frequent down time with their previous dialers.

“We had one day where we were down, a network cable over on the side where the servers were located was frayed or something like that. And the tech side, I believe it was Mark who actually reached out to us personally and told us, ‘Hey, it was our fault. There was a wire. We finally found it.’

“I've never in my life worked with a tech company that has been honest to me about anything. It's always our fault. It's always the leads. It's always our internet connection. And the fact that we had a dialer reach out to us and actually take blame on something – the company CEO and I actually started laughing. It was the first time it's ever happened in our lives because it's very rare. They always try to push blame off on everybody else.

“I love your customer service. I think the interface is absolutely amazing. Your tech support, like I said, is fantastic.”

Since switching to Convoso, One Health Direct is on track to meet their sales and growth goals. With ability to scale quickly and easily, the company plans to open a new location in Puerto Rico and staff 130 agents by 2021. That's the kind of customer success we like to see.

Toward the end of the interview, Jesse had this to say about One Health Direct’s transition to Convoso...

“We make a simple change like a dialer and everything that I knew was right and working all took off. The agents took off, doing more than they ever have. My team is coaching and making more money than they ever have, bonusing and everybody's happy. It's fantastic to see.”