There is nothing more frustrating than when you have an outbound telemarketing campaign rolling along with strong performance, and then have it drop like a rock halfway through the list. It’s a helpless feeling to see your team of agents doing everything in their power to be successful and due to circumstances out of their control they can’t get anyone on the phone to talk to. Seeing the dialer going through the dreaded Spin Cycle, churning through the list and failing to find contacts makes call center managers sick to their stomachs. Also, lead lists are valuable and despite what many think, there isn’t typically an unending supply of appropriate prospects to call. How nice would it be to increase answer rates and get your lists another 15-20% penetrated before you started to see diminishing contacts per hour?
Enter Local Caller ID, bane of the dreaded Spin Cycle. You may already be aware that utilizing Local Caller ID phone numbers can increase answer rates by 40%. But why do answer rates increase with Local Caller ID? Simply, more people are answering the phone because prospects are more likely to answer a call from a number that is local to their area. If more people are answering the phone, what is going to happen to your list penetration? You are going to see it increase more quickly and the dialer won’t spend as much time dialing with a result of no-answer or answering machine. Obviously, list hygiene is a major factor in regards to how much productivity you are going to get out of your list. However, as your answer rates go up, so is the productivity of your list as a whole. This is important, and many times the focus is on the production in the moment. How do the results look right now? Obviously increasing your answer rates helps that. However, getting more productivity out of your list in the long term is much more important. Here’s a simple example of what I’ve seen in getting better list penetration by using Local Caller ID. 
If you could get another 30,000 contacts out of a list size of 100,000, then just apply your normal sales conversion rate (3%, 5%, 10%?). For example, if it is 3%, then 30,000 additional contacts x 3% sales conversion equals 900 more sales from the same list. All that with using Local Caller ID phone numbers! It’s like getting more ‘at bats’ in baseball with the same ‘batting average’. You’ll score more runs every game! The number one excuse and crutch that I hear managers use regarding performance has to do with the leads they have available. As I have said before, if we always had an unlimited supply of customers or super prospects to call life would be peachy. That just isn’t going to be the case. So, if I don’t have an endless stream of leads to dial, the only question is how can I get more out of the leads that I do have? Using Local Caller ID helps do this, getting more people to answer the phone that otherwise would have ignored your call, which in turn gives you deeper penetration in your list and slows the dreaded Spin Cycle.
Note from the QVD team: This is a guest post by Nathan Teahon, Vice President of Quality Contact Solutions (QCS). Nathan and his team of outbound telemarketing managers run thousands of outbound telemarketing hours on a daily basis, both B2B and B2C. No one understands outbound telemarketing and how to get the best results than Nathan.
Nathan Teahon is the Vice President at Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization. As a highly competitive person, Nathan brings his ‘A’ game to work every day, ensuring that each of his clients wins on a daily basis. Nathan carefully balances the operations resources and client goals to ensure his clients receive the highest possible results at the lowest cost. Nathan is a true, born and bred telemarketer. He grew up in the business and intimately knows (and has played) every position on the field, including supervisor, quality assurance, call center manager, program management, account management, and call center psychologist. Nathan can be reached at Nathan.teahon@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5133.