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Trade Secrets: Getting the Best out of Your Outbound Dialler
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Don’t ring parents during the school run “If you don’t have much history of the contact – if perhaps you’re cold calling – clichéd thinking can work until you start building your own records. For example, if you know your contact is a parent, don’t bother phoning at school run times.” Ken Reid
Here’s some common-sense for time-of-day calling: “A telemarketing operation will get higher connect rates calling home numbers outside of business hours than inside business hours.” If you call somebody at the same time of day as you did yesterday you’ll likely get the same outcome.
Set detailed rules for scheduling calls and retries “Key to high productivity is the ability to schedule a call to be made at (roughly) a particular time of day, taking account of history of contact attempts and other intelligence.” Beware any strategy that says ‘Dial all the numbers, then redial all the no answers, then answer machines…’ There is no scope for intelligent selection of time to call in such a model.
A properly cleaned database is worth its weight in gold “Clean up your data before using a dialler. You’d be surprised how many contact centres still set the dialler using a dialling list which is full of out-of-date information, errors and duplications. This is guaranteed to waste time, money and annoy customers. It also risks compliance issues.” Going through every entry may seem time consuming and boring but will reap long-term results.
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It’s automation that makes an outbound dialler so useful, but you can extend that automation across other areas. “Using an application programming interface (API), the dialler can work closely with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.” Integrating your dialler and CRM means you could:
When people don’t recognise the caller’s number, or see a non-geographic number, they’re much less likely to pick up. “Most diallers can set the caller ID to match your prospect’s geographic area – so your callers see a familiar number and are more likely to answer the phone.” With thanks to Chris Key at Hostcomm
But a call centre can have the most sophisticated dialling configuration in the world and still get a poor return on investment if the call data is not solid and reliable. “To get the best out of your outbound dialler, consider each aspect of the campaign. There are various ways in which you can access and refine the best call data available, such as telephone number validation or real-time TPS cleansing. Such procedures allow call centres to maximise the efficiency and productivity of their diallers.” With thanks to Martyn King, Managing Director at Nexbridge
Mike Donohue “A good predictive dialling system will flag these issues up for you without the need to go wading through vast amounts of data to try and pinpoint where the problems are.” You might consider investigating other avenues for data sourcing but you can also look to do more with what you already have. For example, wrong numbers; it’s a quick win to send these records to a data cleansing company for verification.
Progressive dialling works by waiting until the agent has indicated that they are ready for a call, so information about the call is presented and the number is then dialled. “Predictive dialling relies on automatically dialling out calls at a rate forecast to match the speed at which agents will be available – but runs the risk of an agent not being available for a call at any time and therefore those ‘silent calls’.” With thanks to Simon Beeching at Syntec
Look closely at findings to get a true understanding of what is really causing the pattern of connections: who your contacts are, how old they are, what sorts of issues they might have… you have to know your customers! “You should also put everything into their individual profile and keep adding to it so that you have a good picture of who it is you are calling and when they’re likely to be there to answer.” Don’t ring parents during the school run
It’s automation that makes an outbound dialler so useful, but you can extend that automation across other areas. “Using an application programming interface (API), the dialler can work closely with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.” Integrating your dialler and CRM means you could:
Provide agents with up-to-date information from your CRM “Automate follow-up and administration – like changing customer status or despatching more information by post or email” Automation can also be extended to other areas, such as the central calendar system, emails, appointment reminders, inbound email, and SMS messaging.