As the economy continues to struggle businesses are under significant pressure to operate as efficiently and productively as possible, and are sometimes faced doing so with a downsized workforce. In the modern environment business is much about being to maximise as many sales opportunities as possible whilst closely managing costs and productivity as it ever has been. In the sales environment, where businesses and their competitors fight tooth and nail for any potential custom it's as important as ever that sales time and call activity is maximised to its utmost potential.

Whilst sales operations may vary in size there’s one solution available that can help to benefit any sales team’s productivity – whether it’s a small telesales team or a huge call centre operation. Dialler systems are a business telecommunications solution that helps to manage your call activity for you. Generally speaking a dialler system dials through a pre-defined call list and connects any answered calls directly through to a free call centre agent or telesales personnel.

According to Matt Tomkin, Managing director of Greater Manchester based business telecommunications specialists Comms Consult, utilising a dialler system improves productivity levels as ‘in all likelihood, only 1 in 3 calls are answered by a customer or client so this means that potentially two-thirds of call activity time is wasted time’.

Through only connecting answered calls through to call centre or sales agents, and removing the time agents may spend dialling unanswered calls, sales teams become more productive and can focus on more sales opportunities.

As the individual sales operations needs vary so do the variety of dialler systems available. For businesses looking to save on dialling times the predictive dialler saves on agent dialling time by calling several numbers at once. For call centres looking to increase agent talk time the progressive dialler reduces the amount of time between calls by doing away with the need for agents to manage call lists and other administrative tasks. The benefits are significant from Matt Tomkins’ experience as ‘manual call centres average, at best, between 15 to 20 minutes talk time per hour, whereas a progressive dialler has shown to double this activity with some of our clients’.

‘This increase in productive call time increases the potential for a similar increase in profit without requiring additional investment in staff’.

So for a business looking to increase productivity and profit without incurring extra employee overheads, dialler systems may just be the way that a call centre or sales operation can gain that all important competitive advantage despite the gloomy economic outlook.