By Dan Baldwin
SafeSoft Solutions, a California based company specializing in hosted call center solutions recently joined Telecom Association in an effort to share with TA's 3,800 members and their business customers why SafeSoft's set of hosted call center solutions, showcased by their "Market Dialer" are different or better than the call center and predictive dialer solutions that many business customers are using now.
Since all of our readers are interested in getting new competitive intelligence to learn about a new service or solution that might be better than what they're using now, step one in introducing any new vendor is having them sit for a "Competitive Self-Analysis Interview."
Is SafeSoft's Call Center Solution Better for Your Company than What You're Using Now?
This is what we want to learn so we invited Aaron Kohut, SafeSoft's VP of Sales to answer our standard set of competitive intelligence questions.
You can listen to the audio interview now with your computer speaker by clicking the audio player below. You can also click here to download the MP3 file.
The transcript of the interview is published below. Click here to print a transcript.
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Which Hosted Contact Center Predictive Dialing Solution is Right For Your Businesses Call Center Requirements?
A Competitive Self-Assessment of SafeSoft Solutions’ “Market Dialer”
A Business Phone News conversation with Aaron Kohut, the Vice President of SafeSoft Solutions, a hosted contact center solution provider. We've invited Aaron to share with us a competitive self-assessment of their services and solutions including their “Market Dialer” service so our clients know that through the vendors we partner with, our customers are getting the best technology services and solutions available in the marketplace today and tomorrow.
February 2012
DB: Question #1. Solution History - Can you give our audience of business end-users and technology consultants a quick history lesson on your services and solutions, how long has this service or solution category been around, and what business solutions or services are they replacing?
AK: Back in the early 80’s Predictive Dialers began as an on-premise hardware-based system, so they’ve been around for about 30 years. The hosted platform emerged in the 90s and became more popular as VoIP, (“Voice over IP”), technology was evolving. Because VoIP offered lower telecom costs which were one of the expensive components, it definitely helped make the cloud-based service affordable and eventually became the preferred solution.
DB: Question #2. Primary Customer Markets - Which vertical markets and/or customer types and sizes like your solutions or services best and pay attention to you the most? And, are there any metros where you are especially competitive?
AK: One of the great things about the Market Dialer is that it was designed to be universal and fit well into virtually any industry. From banking, to home improvement, to non-profit, and even political campaigning.
Our solutions will improve results in most verticals since we’ve successfully deployed our solution to various industries, and wide range of company sizes from small-to-medium size businesses, all the way to enterprise-level customers with hundreds of employees. The Market Dialer is so easy to use and so customizable that any size company in any industry can realize the benefits of the Market Dialer.
2:04 DB: Question #3. The Elevator Pitch - What's the quick, but complete description that you use to describe what your services and solutions due for customers?
AK: Well Dan, we specialize in deploying hosted call center technologies that enable agents to be much more productive. After the software is implemented, our customers see an immediate increase in the number of contacts they make each day.
On average, they see an increase of about four times more contacts per agent. But aside from technology, we offer exceptional customer service and 24 X 7 support. We certainly place an emphasis on the word service from software as a service (“SaaS”), and the best part is we offer all our new customers a chance to use our software completely free to try it out and see firsthand what a dramatic impact our solutions will have on their business.
DB: Question #4. Catalysts to Action, Google Inquiry and Competitive Key Words - What are the primary pain points or initiating events that become the catalyst for your prospects first taking a look at your services and solutions? What are the Google inquiries that prospects are typing in the search engines that lead them to your solution sets? What are the keyword strings that your competitors are buying in Google Ads to attract your prospects?
AK: Typically there are two general reasons why a company would consider SafeSoft Solutions.
Most common are companies making improvements to their inbound and outbound communications. Improving call center strategy has its challenges, but systems like Market Dialer can be quickly and easily implemented to make an immediate impact.
Plus, they know our skilled staff is there every step of the way to ensure the deployment is done professionally and cost effectively. After that, I would say companies inevitably figure out that a legacy solution they’ve used for years are seriously outdated and overpriced. After a little research online, they’ll find SafeSoft Solutions and realize that it’s not as difficult, or as expensive, to replace these systems by moving to a cloud solution such as the Market Dialer.
4:02 DB: The customers, are they literally typing in what hosted Predictive Dialer, or cloud-based Predictive Dialer? What are they typing into Google to find you and your competitors?
AK: Typically it's “Predictive Dialer”. Something around the nature of hosted call center solutions, improving sales, any of those keywords would definitely drum up some information from SafeSoft.
DB: Question #5. Competitive Comparison and Objection Responses - Who are the other competitors that your prospects are looking at, and how is your service or solution better or different from them? What are all the objections that your competitors raise about your company, and what are your standard objection responses?
AK: In our industry there are some real innovators, and we’re proud just to compete with them. We’re challenged by companies like Five9, Avaya, TelStar Hosted Services, and even some up and comers like YTel.
We’ve been competing with Five9 from day one, and they’re our closest match from a competitive standpoint. While our competition focuses mostly on educating customers on their own software, and of course we do that as well, but we also provide configuration advice and supply proven strategy advice that they can apply to their specific business model and needs.
Some of the methods include our sister company, Innovadia, which exists specifically to supply our customers with marketing lists designed to maximize their overall ROI. One edge we hold over most of our competition is that we provide 24/7 technical support by telephone and email.
We pride ourselves on the level of support we can provide. Very often we go above and beyond what we’re required to do with our customers. We help ensure that they’re properly trained on all aspects of the software, and if necessary go as far as analyzing their network to ensure high quality service outside of our own network control. Our competitors generally ask their customers to have their internal staff, or Internet provider solve their issues.
We also maintain a technical standard of triple-redundancy with all of our hardware to maximize uptime, while we’ve noticed that our competitors experience down-time more frequently than us.
6:22 DB: Question #6. Pain Recognition - If I was promoting your service or solution to my business end-user customer base via email marketing, what are the top 5 subject line acid test questions that I would use to stimulate pain recognition to generate a measurable click, interest in a follow-up phone call or a demonstration?
AK: I would say the first one is probably, “Do You Need More Sales?” And that would be very tough to decline. The next one would be, “Tired of Manually Dialing Leads One at a Time? Boost contacts and sales up to 400%”. Then I would go to, “Can you Track Your Agents’ Performance?” One more, I would say, “Hosted Predictive Dialer, 99.999 Up-Time, Just $75 to Start Service”.
DB: Question #7. Showcase Solutions - If you were to make a short YouTube video showcasing your top five customer solutions for the next 18 months, what would those five solutions be, and what would you title the five videos to garner end-user interest?
AK: The first on the list would be, “Enterprise CRM Integrations”. It’s becoming the standard for companies to have that all-in-one solution for their business. We currently have an open API that enables the Market Dialer to integrate with popular CRM providers like Salesforce and Leads360, but what our customers will see in the future will be seamless, built-in integration capabilities with all the big CRM providers, and that’s what this video would be about.
The next one would be, “Call Metrics & Analytics”. These figures help companies determine success, failure, and of course give them transparency into their call center performance and projections. The data is vital, we know it, they know it, and we will respond to that with creative reporting to collect and analyze data to achieve the goal they desire.
Lastly, I would say, “Real-Time Data Purchasing and Integration” will be another exiting solution arriving sometime in 2012. With the successes we’ve seen from our sister company that provide data services to our clients, we want to give them access to purchase and automatically upload their data directly from Innovadia to the Market Dialer database. This will give them a powerful resource to ensure high quality data is ready on demand so their operation doesn’t skip a beat.
9:08 DB: Question #8. Trusted Advisor Categories, Recommended Vendor Listings - Business end-users like to buy from trusted advisers that they've followed via blogs and other social media. Users generally track their trusted advisers by category interests. What are the top blog post categories you would be posted to as a trusted advisor for your prospects? And under what TA recommended vendor listing by service and vertical or metro should you be linked?
AK: Websites like TMCnet.com, CRMXCHANGE.COM , and TheTelemarketingForum.com are some of the places we get mentioned. As explained previously, we receive quite a bit of our business from referrals, so these sites are a big help in advertising our customers opinion of these services we offer.
But if you’re asking me to drill down to specific categories, I would say call center performance, contact center solutions, software as a service, telemarketing best practices, cloud computing, sales strategies. Those would probably be the primary focuses.
DB: For recommended vendor listings, I would imagine we would have call center solutions. You’re nationwide, right? Or can you do call centers outside of the U.S. as well?
AK: Absolutely. We do have international capabilities.
DB: Are there any specific verticals that gravitate towards hosted Predictive Dialers?
AK: Well, that's the great part about our solution is that it really can apply to any industry at all. It oesn't really matter. As long as you have a need for reaching customers, or reaching their current clients or new prospects, it really doesn't matter. It's not industry specific.
DB: Question #9. Customer Migration - What does the migration look like for your average new customer? Are you mostly displacing other providers of a similar solution, or are you displacing a previous generation of the solution? Do most customers ease into their solution or service via a migration, or is it a forklift cut-over?
AK: Those old boat anchor servers that so many centers had to run their technology on in the past just aren’t as common. So displacing hardware, not so much. However, we see a growing trend of customers migrating to our solution from the more popular brands of hosted service providers.
11:34 You see originally SafeSoft focused its sales strategy on introducing companies to the Market Dialer and really focused on those business that were unaware of the technology or its capabilities. We had lots of success with this strategy, and it certainly helped establish our market position.
At that time, we were uncertain how our product would compete with the more established providers, but now that we’ve got a strong foothold in the industry, we believe that we’ve proven to ourselves and our customers that great solutions don’t need to be from a big brand to get big results.
In a way, we’ve really helped democratize the call center industry by arming the small start-ups with high end systems with low upfront cost. This means even the little guy can compete in today’s global market by implementing solutions like the Market Dialer.
B: As a followup, are most of your customers coming from other solution providers like Five9? Or are they growing businesses that just realized all of a sudden that they have a call center, they are not in the call center business specifically, but they want an in-house call center and they need the Predictive Dialer solution?
12:43 AK: I would like to say we're helping a lot of companies get attracted to systems like this, but it's not as common because there are a lot of these systems out there, so more often than not they're coming from one of our competitors and not fulfilling their needs so they're coming to SafeSoft and the Market Dialer to really reach their goals.
DB: Question 10. How to Buy - What are your different go to market channels? Do you have direct, channel partners, wholesale? What is it that you're doing to get customers?
AK: We have a really strong online presence. If you go online and search for Predictive Dialers, it would be tough not to see a listing from SafeSoft Solutions. Second to the internet, a large portion of our business as mentioned comes directly from our customer referrals.
We figured out really early on that if we provide exceptional services, our customers would reward us with exceptional recommendations. We also have a few select wholesalers, not a lot. We really don’t want the quality of our solution to be compromised by price, so not too many folks are equipped out there well enough to maintain the high quality services we offer.
DB: As a followup question, your average customers, how do you measure them? By numbers of seats that they're trying to fill? By numbers of minutes? What is an average customer for SafeSoft when we're out there looking for new customers for you guys?
AK: Average customers, we measure it in a couple ways. Primarily it is the number of seats or users that would be on the system, and our average is somewhere in the 20 or 25 agent range, but it's also measured by what their activities are. Some of them are inbound centers that don't have the same needs as outbound centers. It's also measured on some of the integration needs that they have, or work flow and procedural requirements. So, a lot of those are measured collectively, so there's no one thing that we can say this is what all of our customers are.
14:42 DB: The average customers that is taking a look at you, let's say they were Five9’s now, are they switching because of some functionality that you have that Five9’s doesn't have? Or because you just have better pricing? Or you just have some better something else?
AK: It's definitely a combination of a few factors. Primarily, which we get told all this information from our customers of course, but our customer service is exceptional. Very few, if any companies out there can compete with what we offer. That hands-on, hand-holding that we offer them is really something that is essential for the success of these deployments.
We focus heavily on making sure that they are running smoothly from the start. That's primarily what they come to us for, even if we were a higher price than a competitor. They come to us just for that reason. But we are very competitive, and there are few companies out there that can match not only the customer service that we offer, but also the competitive prices we can offer as well.
DB: Question #11. About your company. Can you give us a history or background of the company? What led the company to where it is today, and who's running or owning the company? Where will the company be in 5 years? Are there any exit strategies?
AK: It's funny that you should ask that. I attend a lot of seminars on start-ups and technology firms, and this question is actually asked quite often. The funny thing is that the common answer I see is by accident, and SafeSoft is no different.
SafeSoft was founded by Nima and Bobby Hakimi. They wanted to start an outbound call center to sell and support software we were distributing at the time. When we looked into the available solutions back in 2006, they were really expensive. We knew very little about this technology except that they were incredibly expensive and of course way out of our price range.
Luckily for us, we’ve always had talented and ambitious developers so they loved the challenge, which was to build a light CRM with some VoIP integration to automate the calls for us. Off they went, and a few months later they had our first prototype.
16:49 Almost immediately, and I mean that day, we knew we had a great product, but it was still in its infancy stage so we didn’t know how great it really was, but the key to our success turned out to be that the product was that we specialized in two things, marketing primarily, and creative development to compliment it.
This combo gave us the ability to develop the Market Dialer into a great product, and we knew exactly who we could market it to, companies just like us.
DB: This is Dan Baldwin. We've been talking to Aaron Kohut, the SafeSoft Vice President. SafeSoft is a provider of hosted contact center solutions. Aaron, thanks for speaking with us today. Is there anything we forgot to talk about?
AK: I appreciate being here, and actually I wanted to share one other exciting piece of information. We actually just recently started a beta release of our newest product, Market Dialer Pro. We’ve been working on this version for a few years now, and for anyone currently using the original Market Dialer, you will be impressed with what we’ve done with this new version.
We’ve listened to our customers and researched the industry so we can be sure this product will fill voids and offer exciting new features. I can’t share much info because it’s still kind of in the final stages of development, but I encourage everyone to visit our website SafeSoftSolutions.com where the release will be first announced. Also you should follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be kept aware of this release.
DB: Aaron, thanks for talking to us today. We look forward to a followup in the near future.
AK: My pleasure, Dan. Thank you so much.
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