I closed six physical call centers in 2017 because it was a lot of overhead and felt like a dark cloud hovering above me. It’s funny, because I spent the next several years right back in the call center business,  except this time, I was determined to fix the part that was quietly bleeding everyone in the industry dry.

The dialer.

Anyone running a call center knows you can’t operate without one. Whether you bought it from one of the big providers or built your own on VICIdial, the dialer is the engine. And like most engines people rely on every day, nobody thinks about it until it costs them money.

Here’s what I kept running into. If you run VICIdial on standard Vici servers, in our experience you’re overpaying on hosting and not getting the best connections. At 26 agents, the Vici server hosting alone often runs around $800 a month,  and that’s just the hosting piece, before VOIP, leads, labor, or anything else that goes into running a center. That number always bothered me, because the actual cost of delivering that hosting is nowhere near that high. People were paying a premium for infrastructure that underperformed.

So we built Dial Fusion to do it differently. On our setup, the same 26 agents whose hosting runs around $800 on Vici run closer to $260 on Fusion, and a team of 30 runs about $300 a month in hosting. It’s not cheaper because it’s worse,  it’s cheaper because we built the infrastructure ourselves instead of renting it from somebody marking it up.

Behind it sits over 100 servers,  25 physical and 75 virtual,  deployed across a cloud environment. We handle roughly 47 million API calls a day, and our load factor stays well under capacity. When you’re running outbound at volume, that headroom matters. Latency hurts conversations, and dropped calls hurt revenue.

We connect through more than seven tier-one carriers, and we’re registered with the FCC as a carrier under the 499 form. Moving onto tier-one carriers alone made a real difference in our own daily margins. That’s not a software feature. That’s money that was leaking out the side of the operation until we fixed the plumbing underneath it.

Dial Fusion connects directly to LeadBranch, so agents can text and email a customer while they’re still on the phone with them. If a customer misses a call, a follow-up text can fire automatically to get them to call back. That one piece helps reduce spam risk and recover leads that would otherwise just vanish.

It’s built for call centers, lead buyers, and anyone running outbound at scale who’s tired of overpaying for infrastructure that doesn’t perform. We run our own centers on it. That’s the only reason I’m comfortable putting it in front of anyone else.

In the call center business, your dialer either makes you money or costs you money.I built one that’s on the right side of that to solve my own problems, and inadvertently, yours too.

— Joe Delfgauw

More at joedelfgauw.com