Pros & Cons of PhoneBurner: Analysis of a Leading Call Center Software

While the price of a call center solution is an essential factor, it pays to take a look at other key features that could raise your sales team’s output. You will want to examine the popular tools available on the market to increase the likelihood that your target customers will pick up the phone. With this review of the pros and cons of PhoneBurner, we will look into all these and more.

If you have other business systems, you may want to integrate them with a call center application to create a cohesive ecosystem. These are only some of the features that can help you step up your call center game. And these are the features that you want to make sure PhoneBurner has.

PhoneBurner is one of the most reliable and robust call center software providers in the market today. As we discuss its pros and cons, we will examine, in particular, what makes it one of the most sought-out solutions as well as any issues that it might have. After reading this piece, you should be able to gauge how it can give your business a boost.

The sales process is a crucial undertaking for any company, not to mention one of its most challenging aspects. But what 40% of salespeople find most difficult to deal with is getting a response from prospects. Similarly, 29% of sales representatives have a hard time connecting with potential customers.

This coincides with the prediction of companies that their phone interactions with customers would be reduced, accounting for only 47% of contacts by 2019. North America, Australia, and New Zealand especially identified this as their second most difficult sales challenge. Still, the phone remains the most successful channel for connecting with sales prospects according to 36% of respondents in a global sales and marketing survey.

However, there are activities like data entry and other manual tasks that take salespeople’s time away from doing actual selling. Thirty-five percent of representatives say they spend somewhere between 31 to 60 minutes on those activities. This is a dent on their productivity, which can be helped by a variety of solutions, including a call center software like PhoneBurner.

What is PhoneBurner?

PhoneBurner is one of the major players in the call center software market. It boasts an enhanced power dialing tool, which enables sales representatives to increase their sales productivity and performance. That is because the module can dial up to 80 leads per hour.

Other than that, PhoneBurner handles repetitive tasks to allow salespeople to focus on interacting with prospects and customers instead. This is complemented by the automatic lead distribution system called LeadStream. This time-saving innovation assigns leads to the right agents to make sure they do not get cold.

The call center system also integrates a text marketing module. This is an essential feature of the solution as this can help increase callbacks. What’s more, sales professionals can send SMS to potential buyers and existing clients directly from the dialer window or the contact’s record.

If you want to investigate the features closely, you can easily do so when you sign up for PhoneBurner free trial here.

Not only is PhoneBurner a powerful platform, but it is also an inclusive software. This means that even if you have less than ten seats, it is still for you. That is because it is designed for use by companies of all sizes.

PhoneBurner Advantages and Disadvantages

Boost sales with Power Dialer

While a power dialer is a standard feature found in call center software, what makes PhoneBurner’s different is how many telephone numbers it can dial in an hour. With this technology, agents can go through anywhere from 60 to 80 contacts in 60 minutes. This can raise sales employees’ productivity four times and make more conversations happen. Because of this, there are more opportunities for sales employees to pitch and close deals.

PhoneBurner’s power dialer lets agents connect to anywhere from 60 to 80 contacts in 60 minutes.

The PhoneBurner power dialer also helps conversations sound more natural because there are no awkward silences. As soon as a representative hears the lead talking on the other line, they can respond instantaneously. This way, they can engage the prospective customer and avoid being hung up on.

Live answers with Local Caller ID

People are generally suspicious of unknown numbers, more so when it is not a local number. This is one reason why most salespeople lose opportunities. To remedy that, you can get a local number and increase the chances of prospects picking up the call.

PhoneBurner can help in that regard. It has flexible plans that offer local caller IDs for locations that matter to you. Whenever your agents dial a number in any of your selected geographies, call recipients automatically see a local number. Thus, outbound calls are likely to be more successful.

Effortless campaign management

If you do not yet have a CRM or are looking to cut costs, PhoneBurner has a built-in CRM that can help manage both contacts and campaigns. It allows you to keep complete contact records because it has fields for email, address, contact number, and website. Each contact card has a comprehensive history of the exchanges between your company and the contact. That means you can see when a sales agent last spoke to the customer over the phone, through text, or via email. You can also see whether they have opened the links you shared with them or not. This is convenient, as you get to know when a prospect is ready for conversion.

No CRM? No problem—PhoneBurner provides all the CRM you need to manage growing contacts.

All this information is arranged in tabs:

• Profile
• Activity
• Call Recordings
• Demographics
• Changes
• LeadStream Timeline
• Documents
• SMS

As such, it is easy for you to find the data you need, which can be helpful when one agent picks up where another left off. This is also in line with upcoming call center trends, which include omnichannel communication.

But if you are looking for a full-featured CRM software, the built-in module may fall short of your expectations.

Intelligent lead distribution to teams

Sales managers know that assigning leads manually, even with the use of lead distribution and management software, is always a struggle. Errors happen, and profitable opportunities could slip away because they sat on the pipeline too long. PhoneBurner can help mitigate this with its automatic lead distribution system, LeadStream. This assigns new leads to the right agents as soon as they enter the pipeline.

PhoneBurner eliminates the pains of manual lead assignment via an intelligent lead distribution system.

To ensure that your team makes every opportunity count, you can control the rules of the distribution process. Therefore, you can ensure that hot leads get assigned to the most effective agents. You can also choose to distribute leads equally to make certain that everyone is productive.

Faster contact search

Finding contacts is made seamless by PhoneBurner. How so?

It has an intelligent lead filtering tool that allows you to find your target using parameters like tags, location, last engagement, and even custom fields. This refinement narrows down search results so you can see the information you want faster.

Live updates on performance insights

You don’t need a full-fledged business intelligence tool to monitor the productivity and performance of your sales team with PhoneBurner. The contact center software provides a clear picture across all KPIs. For one, it lets you track each dialing activity and the results of each call. You can look at the broader picture, or you can drill down into every data.

And if you want to see how your agents are performing individually, you can also generate custom reports. You can filter the results according to the metrics that are most important to you. Best of all, the reports are based on real-time data, so you have a clear picture of the status of your sales at a given time. Though it takes a while to get to the reporting section because of the way the menu is organized, it still only requires a few clicks to generate the information you need.

PhoneBurner has a live leaderboard, as well. Not only does this allow you to see the most productive members of the team, it likewise serves as a motivation for sales employees. This is where you can integrate your gamification program to give the department’s productivity a boost.

Integrate with CRMs and other solutions

Your company’s overall efficiency can get a boost from PhoneBurner. That is because you can integrate the telemarketing application with third-party systems and streamline the flow of data between each.

For example, you have a CRM. You can synchronize it with PhoneBurner so that you can dial contact numbers right on the contact record in the solution. One of the CRMs supported by PhoneBurner is Zoho CRM. However, the connection is not direct. Instead, you have to go through PieSync, which requires an account and a monthly or yearly subscription.

Additionally, if you are a fan of field service management software, you will not find the solution in the list of integrations yet. But PhoneBurner is constantly working on expanding its list so you can count on ServiceNow being included in the future.

Manage team members

PhoneBurner has several tools for team management. One of those is lead distribution, and another is agent productivity tracking. When you sign up for the solution, you can also dictate how many seats you want to have to accommodate the current size of your team.

But if you are looking for options for listening in to calls and whispering to your agents during phone conversations, PhoneBurner does not have it. It also doesn’t come with a barging in feature, which would enable you to salvage phone calls or to speak with customers yourself.

Nevertheless, other components allow you to manage your team members.

Assisted onboarding and live support

When you begin to implement PhoneBurner in your company, you can expect the support team to be there for you. They make sure to understand your own processes so that you can maximize PhoneBurner and reach your productivity and efficiency goals.

Guidance is free, as well. Hence, you can get in touch with a PhoneBurner support representative whenever you encounter issues or even if you have a question about how a tool works.

More than just a call center software

Call center solutions are focused on providing dialing tools and call management features. Though PhoneBurner falls under that category, it goes beyond such inclusions and integrates email and campaign management tools. It even has an SMS messaging module that gives another angle to telemarketing.

If you are looking for a solution that can help you reach more and do more, then PhoneBurner is right up your alley. It has a single pricing plan that is flexible to accommodate, the more seats you have. As such, you can provide a powerful program for every team member without breaking the bank. If you want to be sure, you can go beyond our pros and cons of PhoneBurner review and take the platform for a test drive. You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs. Simply sign up for PhoneBurner free trial here.

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.