Outbound contact centers are the sales and marketing engine that powers growth for many companies with revenue teams. Or at least they’re meant to be.

Without the right software and tools, too many contact centers fail to live up to their full potential. And particularly, without automation, customization, and speed, they can fall way behind their competitors.

To understand just how crucial the right dialer software can be for today’s contact centers, we had a conversation with Brian Spurgeon, Contact Center Director at Long Home Products, whose team has undergone a transformational shift in the way they contact leads and set appointments over the last two years.

Read the Long Home Products story below to see how this home services lead generation team automated and optimized their way toward nearly twice as many appointments—and a brighter future—with the help of the Convoso dialer.

• Slow speed to lead in competitive industry

• Low contact rates

• Inefficient dialing strategies

• Lack of data insights into calling practices

• Powerful predictive dialer with industry-leading speed to lead

• Granular, automated contact center reporting tools

• Comprehensive caller ID reputation management

• Dedicated customer support team

• StateTracker tool for mini-TCPA compliance

• 67% increase in appointment set rates

• 33% increase in contact rates with ClearCallerID Pro

• Average speed to lead reduced from over 2 minutes to just seconds

• State-of-the-art configurability unlocks successful data-driven strategies

• Automated compliance support for multi-state dialing campaigns

“Convoso has really been a game-changer for us as a company, in terms of how much our agents can output to our teams [in the field]. We're seeing levels of appointments and demos that we've never seen before.”

– Brian Spurgeon, Contact Center Director, Long Home Products

Talking to Long Home Products Contact Center Director Brian Spurgeon about life before Convoso, he asked us to imagine a scenario:

Your business is regularly adding around 12,000 new leads. You have 40 agents whose goal is to get those leads on the phone and set an appointment for a roof, bath, or window replacement. But these agents are manually dialing each and every one of those numbers.

No matter how fast your agents could dial through their lists, there’s no way they were going to be fast enough to be efficient and effective.

In the home services industry , where leads are hotly contested, Long Home Products agents couldn’t get to their leads in time. According to Spurgeon, their contact rates were “abysmal”.

In fact, competitors were often setting appointments before they even called.

And speed wasn’t the only issue. A manual dialing process leaves little room for strategy and optimization. All the team could do was dial and dial and dial, fueling Spam Likely labels and frustration among both leads and agents.

The Long Home Products contact center needed a dialing solution—but which one? Their search narrowed their options down to Convoso and Five9.

Ultimately, they chose Convoso because of the dialer’s industry-best speed to lead and configurability. Plus, a month-to-month contract allowed them to "kick the tires" before making a long-term investment, as they would have needed to do with Five9.

Of course, it didn’t take long for the team to feel the impact of their new solution. Switching to a powerful predictive dialer, there was immediately a new energy on the Long Home Products sales floor: agents were talking to more people, setting more appointments, driving more demos, and making more money. Success didn’t just come quickly—it was contagious.

After just six months with the dialer, Spurgeon said that he had to ask himself, “Are my KPIs too low?” With agents setting new records across metrics, such as hours per set and hours per demo, Spurgeon needed to set the team’s sights on much higher goals.

“It's really been a game changer for us as a company, in terms of how much our agents can output to our teams. We're seeing levels of appointments and demos that we've never seen before in the company.”

In hindsight, Spurgeon says that this immediate impact was just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, they were still just beginning to understand all the ways they could customize and optimize their approach to dialing leads.

With their increasingly optimized strategies, the Long Home Products team is driving unprecedented performance, with agents setting 67% more appointments they were previously—all while agent hours only increased 9% YoY.

He notes that there are lots of decisions about how to use this dialer, and that they’re all critical to successfully setting appointments and to the success of the company. So, as time has gone on, they continue to find ways to fine-tune their approach.

“Convoso is really state-of-the-art in terms of how you approach strategy on a daily basis,” Spurgeon says.

With Convoso, Spurgeon can adjust dialing levels based on wait times to maximize agent productivity. He can recycle and move leads between lists based on a wide variety of statuses to maximize their value.

All the while, they’re able to use a custom API script to achieve massive improvements in speed to lead. Instead of new leads going uncalled for several minutes or more, the Long Home Products team can now automatically prioritize its warmest, ready-to-convert leads and call within just seconds, with the help of Convoso's proprietary DX5 dialer engine. And rather than overdial customers, they utilize workflow automation tools to create data-driven dialing cadences, placing just five calls or fewer at the right times of day.

“We've had a really tremendous last four or five months—some of the best that the company's ever had—and we could not do it without Convoso as our dialer.”

This continuous cycle of innovation and improvement drives sustained revenue growth and keeps Long Home Products ahead of the competition.

ClearCallerID™ has revolutionized the way Spurgeon’s team manages the 1,200 DIDs they use across different markets. This caller ID reputation management tool identifies issues with flagged DIDs and automatically remediates them, eliminating the need for Long Home Products to manually handle this ongoing task.

With ClearCallerID Pro™, Spurgeon’s team saw a 33% increase in contact rates—particularly for their freshest leads–which increased from 12% to up to 16%. They also gained strategic insights to further optimize contact rates and lead management.

“What I love about this capability with Convoso is that, in real time, they’re catching the flagged or ‘spam likely’ DID, and they're automatically resting it,” he explains. “They're reauthenticating it with the carriers, and then once it gets cleaned, they're putting it back in. Nobody does that. I don't think any other platforms like Convoso are at this level of DID management.”

Spurgeon also praised the ClearCallerID™ dashboard, which provides different data about contact rates for clean versus flagged and blocked DIDs.

“They're giving us different data about contact rates for clean versus flagged and blocked DIDs. This is stuff we've never seen before now,” he says. “It tells me my clean contact rate and my overall flagged and blocked DIDs.”

In addition to the valuable insights, Spurgeon highlights the process efficiency and excellent support from Convoso’s team.

“It’s really neat because I can call or email Betty and say, ‘Hey, can you take a look at those [flagged DIDs]? Why do we have so many of them?’ She's able to go in and look at when they submitted it to be cleaned and how long it's taking for it to come back. Those are features we would have been paying $3,000 a month for through a different vendor.”

Whether it’s sharing updates with company leadership or identifying opportunities for coaching, granular, real-time insights help the Long Home team make data-driven decisions that continue to fuel revenue growth.

“Reporting is so easy to do with Convoso,” says Spurgeon, who receives automated updates on a custom array of KPIs and metrics every two hours. On top of performance data, he’s also created a custom report that identifies poor-performing lead aggregators and bad numbers.

Convoso's configurability plays a significant role in fostering this data-driven culture. The platform's customizable dashboard, powerful reporting capabilities, and easy-to-configure campaigns enable the Long Home team to tailor their reports and campaigns to meet their specific business needs. This flexibility ensures they can focus on the most relevant metrics and make timely adjustments to their strategies.

“With Convoso, you can build a campaign the way you want to build it. You can put lists into the campaign, you can assign agents, you can break it down by how old the leads are. There's a lot of different things you can do with configuration to help you strategize and win the day,” Spurgeon says.

“It's the most powerful dialer that I've ever been associated with…It’s really important to understand how powerful the configurability of this dialer is.”

"I love the reporting and how quickly we can get to information about our lead aggregators, what statuses those leads are in, how quickly we're calling those leads…I can get that in seconds with Convoso. It's easy to pull, it's easy to look at, and it's easy to put into a spreadsheet and send it out.”

Not only do these insights keep managers informed and partners in check, but they also help foster a culture of experimentation and innovation. With access to real-time data, it’s easier than ever for the team to test new approaches and make positive changes.

“We love data. It’s one of our key principles here, that data and facts set you free from emotion. And Convoso helps us do that.”

At Long Home Products, ensuring seamless operations and staying compliant with evolving regulations is a top priority. Convoso has proven to be an indispensable partner in achieving these goals through unmatched support, proactive compliance leadership, and innovative solutions like StateTracker™.

Convoso’s award-winning, white-glove customer care team dedicates significant time to helping customers get the most out of their Convoso solutions. Spurgeon praises the exceptional support he receives from Convoso.

“Your support is second to none. If I was going to say what you truly excel at, it’s support.”

The level of personalized attention and assistance Convoso provides is unparalleled. Spurgeon notes that his team hasn't missed a single week without meeting with their sales account manager, tech support contact, or technical account manager to ensure everything is running smoothly. “While change can be difficult, I feel like Convoso has really done a good job of holding our hand through that change,” he says.

Convoso’s compliance leadership and support is another standout feature for the Long Home Products team. As Contact Center Director, Spurgeon’s job isn’t just to keep agents fed with a steady supply of leads. It’s also, as he says, to keep the company “out of hot water.”

Dialing leads across multiple states and supporting compliance is typically no simple task. However, with Convoso's StateTracker™, supporting compliance has never been easier. After onboarding with Convoso, the Long Home Products team got early access to the StateTracker™ solution.

As the only campaign management tool designed specifically to support compliance with new Mini-TCPA state laws, StateTracker™ uses rules-based automation to support compliance with each state’s unique restrictions. This tool automates compliance checks, reduces the risk of human error, and supports safer and more efficient dialing practices.

"From [Convoso’s] LinkedIn account, I see quite a bit of information about the new FCC regulations. I think Convoso has really tried to take a leadership position on what this means to the industry and trying to make sure their customers stay informed," Spurgeon says.

“I really feel like that's one of the things that sets Convoso apart is that they're looking out for their customers.”

Over a year and a half into their partnership with Convoso, the Long Home Products team might be most excited about the fact that there’s still so much within the Convoso platform to explore.

On the back of record-setting performance, they’re looking forward to reaching new heights and exploring new capabilities with the help of Convoso’s dedicated support team. In the year ahead, they plan to dig into Convoso’s scripting software offerings, which they’ll leverage to speed up agent training times and—with the help of integrations with Balto and Salesforce—harness even more performance data.

It’s just one more way, among many, that the Convoso dialer is helping Long Home Products make the most of their investment.

“I’ve been on RingCentral, and I’ve been on Cisco and a couple of others. Sometimes when you get a dialer, it’s ‘out of the box.’ What you get is what you get…With Convoso, you can build a campaign the way you want to build it…There’s a lot of different things you can do with the configuration to help you strategize and win the day.”

Take the first step toward scaling your contact center today. Schedule a free demo of our predictive dialer software and see for yourself the difference Convoso delivers.