Power of Intelligent Communications – Premise-based Dialers are a Dying Breed
Found a link today to a pretty interesting research report from Frost and Sullivan detailing the decline of premise-based (hardware) dialer technologies in the year 2009.
The space suffered negative revenue growth (down 5.6%), and the summary indicated the reasons, none of which will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the hosted software/SaaS dialer space:
“Other methods and media are supplementing the use of agent-assisted outbound calling to comply with the laws and reduce campaign cost . . . Point solutions for outbound customer contact while still valuable are increasingly being viewed as not as efficient or effective for multi-function and unified outbound customer contact campaigns. Trends indicate that market demand is rapidly shifting away from point solutions.”
In other words, premise-based dialer technologies are
- too inflexible
- require a heavy up front cost investment, and as the 2009 economy showed us, the ongoing benefit and ROI of the investment is far from a sure thing
- don’t integrate well into other systems
- and last but not least, don’t link to other data applications to gain additional insight into existing business, call, and sales trends.
Hosted dialer solutions, on the other hand, mitigate or eliminate all of the above, particularly the sunk costs associated with dialer hardware. It increasingly makes little sense to sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into a piece of hardware that isn’t going to show a true ROI for 3-6 years, especially when there’s no guarantee that the initiatives that drove the adoption will still be a viable business model by the time the company actually sees any ROI.
Author: Ken Krogue | Google+
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