Companies no longer are able to afford hundreds of people hunched over their phones with dog eared pages of cold calling scripts or coffee stained lists of potential customer’s names. The days of battalions of onsite phone answering personnel are long gone. Virtual call centers are more cost effective in the long run, and they free up time spent on mundane tasks for other, more seriously required aspects of customer care. Cold calling by a real person is only done by those companies that are bound to stay locked in the past.

Outbound IVR systems, using a company’s prerecorded message is the perfect way to eliminate some major expense from the budget, in addition to reaching thousands of customers faster and easier than what a human phone operator could do. No matter how fast and efficient a real person is, they can only carry on a conversation with one customer at a time. With the right tools and the right message, the virtual call center can reach thousands at the same time.

New technology in this industry is creating newer and better call centers with smarter IVR systems – that not only save a company time and space, but money as well. Using call manager dashboards and other tools allows the IT professional to set up the system and then move on to other tasks.

Cold calling success by the numbers

 For an example, let’s assume that the success rate of the cold calling human operator is ten percent. They can complete ten calls per hour, for eighty calls in an eight hour work day, five days a week. That is 400 calls per week for the human. At ten percent success rate, you have generated sales 40 times during that week for the live operator. Now, consider the call volume of the fully automated IVR system which could possibly generate that number per hour – which means that if the system has the same ten percent success rate, the numbers would be staggering. Of course, in reality most people know that the call/success rate for the machine is slightly different; however it is still positive enough to make it worth it.

Virtual Call Centers do not get the flu

Every company dreads the cold and flu season as they deal with absent staff or worse, dedicated staff who drag their germ infested bodies into work and infect everybody in the office. There is nothing worse than trying to make a number of cold calls while suffering the effects of a cold, unless you are the unfortunate customer on the other end of the line. Using an automated system eliminates this problem as well.

 Changing the message in mid stream

The ability to change your prerecorded message is also a big bonus, especially if there is an emergency that would affect what is being said. For instance, if your prerecorded message initially told customers that the a new product was being released the following morning and your distributor just called to say that the shipment was rerouted to Timbuktu and would not arrive until Thursday instead, you have to be able to a) call back and inform the customers of the mistake and b) change the outbound message for the rest of the customers so that the right information is given. Think of how long it would take for live operators to do all of that.