3CLogic Blog » Dialer

Why do I need 3CLogic if I already have CRM?

Ramana Reddy — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:07:21 +0000

You are using Salesforce or another type of CRM software to help you manage your sales team. You can view the history of interactions with customers, every product they have purchased, all opportunities in the pipeline and every sale you have won/lost. You can also run some neat reports that you can share with your management team.
However, there has been no increase in sales after you implemented the CRM system. Not only were the setup costs high, but your sales associates were bogged down with training for almost a week. These prices in addition to recurring monthly installments can add up to significant amounts. To understand why you have not been able to take advantage of the productivity software, answer the following questions about your sales team and process:
S. No Question about sales process Answer
1 Each sales rep follows their own sales cycle to close T or F
2 Each sales rep has their own scripts for calls T or F
3 The sales team has met or exceeded sales expectations in the last month, quarter year T or F
4 Face to face meetings with customers are critical for closing sales T or F
5 The sales reps capture all interactions with customers on CRM T or F
6 I have full visibility into their daily activities; how many calls they make, if they are busy on calls or doing other work T or F
7 I know how many of these calls were conversations versus busy, no-answer, leaving a message on answering machine or the customer saying, “call me back at a better time” T or F
8 I have access to all my ‘Sale’ calls including recordings and can use them for training T or F

If you have answered False to most or all of the questions, the problem is not with your CRM software but how you manage your inside sales team. You need to augment your CRM system with a contact center which gives you the inside view into your sales team.
Would you like to know:
S. No Question Y or N
1. How many calls they make: daily, weekly and monthly without relying on the self-reporting by reps?
2. How many calls are conversations where the sales process is moving forward?
3. How much time they spend making calls, chatting with customers, emailing customers?
4. If they are following the scripts and sales process that was give to them as part of expensive training?
5. If they are busy making frequent calls to their girlfriends/friends using the phone system or making customer calls during office hours
6. If you can listen to live calls that your agents are having with the customers to see if they are following the script?
7. If the follow-up calls moving the sale forward or backward?
8. If you can coach the rep on live calls to close a deal before it is too late?
9. If there is a way to download the call or chat recordings and use them for training purposes?
10. How there would minimal or no cost for training reps when implement the contact center solution?
If the answer to most of these questions is ‘yes’, then you need to look at 3CLogic’s contact center software hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help manage your sales team actively and increase sales. Integrating this multi-channel software with your existing CRM solutions will provide the necessary productivity gains for you; guaranteed.

For more information, please contact 3CLogic at 800-350-8656 or info@3clogic.com. http://www.3clogic.com.
About 3CLogic:
3CLogic, headquartered in Rockville, Md., is a leading provider of cloud based call center and social media applications for interactive e-commerce transactions. 3CLogic adds voice, chat and text capabilities to any e-commerce transaction on social media networks and combines them with a cloud based contact center solution. 3CLogic’s Inbound Cloud Call Center and Hosted Predictive Dialer, combined with cloud technologies, helps companies of all sizes increase sales and provide better customer service. For more information, please contact 3CLogic at 800-350-8656 or info@3clogic.com. http://www.3clogic.com.

Media Contact
Taryn Cheatham
3CLogic
tcheatham@3clogic.com

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Security And Data Lock-In Concerns with Software as a Service (SaaS)

Raj Sharma — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:28:54 +0000

Whenever I read an article about SaaS or participate in a discussion that has anything to do with SaaS, concerns about security and data lock-in always surface at some point. When call center software is being delivered as SaaS and if the client application is in the financial industry, security requirements may even become show stoppers for the call center service to be delivered as a cloud service. The financial client may mandate that confidential customer information such as credit card numbers and social security numbers cannot be transmitted or stored outside of the customer premise. Traditionally such stringent security requirements dictated that the call center solution be deployed on customer’s premise. Only if there was a solution that would let the financial customer have the cake and eat it too i.e. opt for the call center solution as SaaS while ensuring that sensitive customer information never leaves its premise.

Marrying distributed computing architecture for a call center solution with SaaS, it is possible for customers to have their cake and eat it too. With a distributed computing architecture for call centers, sensitive and confidential information is stored on-premise close to where the call processing is happening on agent’s desktop. And non-sensitive information about that customer record such as name and phone number is stored in the cloud and used as a pointer to fetch sensitive information from a local database or a CRM application when the call is connected. All the management, reporting and analytics for the call center is still delivered from the cloud. Sensitive and confidential information such as call recordings are stored locally on customer premise instead of storing these in the cloud. This is possible because with a distributed architecture there is no centralized dialer operating in the cloud. Recordings are done on agent’s PC where the call processing is also done and the recordings are streamed to a local server for retrieval later on. If all this sounds like “just-in-time” security for call center SaaS, it is. And it is made possible by combining distributed computing with cloud computing services.

How is Server based Central dialer different from Distributed 3CLogic dialer?

Nitin Gupta — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:25:32 +0000

To put it simply, a dialer is a piece of code that dials a number automatically.
The goal of the dialer can differ with requirements. As an example, consider that Jane wants to call all her friends to invite them for dinner. She will do this in her own leisure and will call all the numbers sequentially, repeating them until she has called them all. This is what 3CLogic calls a Power Dialer.
Now consider that she has 10000 guests to call. She will definitely need to hire some help, let’s call him George, to call on her behalf and let him make the calls. Since she is paying George per hour, she will like to make sure that her hire reaches the maximum number of guests possible in an hour(That’s being Scrooge). If I assume that some of these 10000 guests must have their phones sending calls directly to automated answering machines, Jane will be paying George to identify her guests on answering machines. What if most of her guests do not pick up, sending George directly to their answering machines? This would really hit Jane where it hurts; her wallet. All of these calls being sent to answering machines will cause Jane to be doubly poor because she is paying George for all the time he spends. One of the obvious goals for the dialer is to identify if the number is on an answering machine using standard heuristics called Answering Machine Detection. When the dialer detects answering machines before handing off the call to George, he can skip that call and move on to the next guest. 3CLogic calls this type of dialer, the Rapid Dialer.
Now let’s add in the fact that Jane only has one day to complete the calls. By golly, she will have to hire Sally to work with George. Now Jane has hired two representatives and still is pressed on time issues. This makes the dialer a bit more interesting, because now the dialer applies artificial intelligence to determine when her hire is going to put the receiver down so it can start dialing a little earlier than that.
During your own personal phone calls you may have noticed:
• There is some time consumed in dialing
• There is some initial silence, while your call is being connected
• There is some ringing before the caller picks up the call
If the dialer saves time for Sally and George, they are likely to make more calls per hour and will be more likely to complete the calls in a day. This is what we at 3CLogic call, the Predictive Dialer.
Now poses the real question: How is a server based central dialer different from a distributed 3CLogic dialer? To start with, it saves Jane the cost of the central server which amounts up to thousands of dollars. The 3CLogic dialer also uses free computation cycles that Sally and George have on their laptops. This saves her greenbacks on power requirements. The 3CLogic dialer uses heuristics and algorithms which outdo even the best central dialers available in the market today. This all helps Jane save a few hours, and a few bucks- on commissions.
To give you an overview of why the 3CLogic dialer works better than a central dialer, let me expand the number of hires to a bigger value, say 64 agents are hired and the calls to be made are racking up to a few million. Now imagine how many quad core central servers will need to compete to make this raw power available. Did you say 16? Well, you have just made a point why distributing the calls on the 3CLogic dialer makes the most sense.
If this does not satisfy your ‘technical urges’, let me make another point. Every call that is made, requires a little RAM, a little of CPU cycles and a little of bandwidth (Is this technical?). Well, yes, if you know that there is limit to the amount of RAM you can have on a single server and the cost of high end CPU. To make matters worse, suppose your hires are distributed across the world, you will be paying double for the bandwidth requirements. Now who says that saving your bandwidth is futile? Not Jane Of course!!