Matt Taylor
Customers often ask me what's hot in the world of predictive dialers and outbound contact center operations. The answer to this question often focuses on the tools that the outbound contact center needs to meet and exceed its goals. The goals of outbound operations are typically focused on increasing revenue, decreasing cost, rapidly responding to challenges, improving flexibility, and maintaining compliance.
Today's - and tomorrow's - successful outbound operation's tool set includes:
- Centralized Infrastructure and Administration - SIP has enabled an IP contact center to separate servers and applications from agents and supervision minimizing the cost of IT, simplifying maintenance, and providing a consistent solution
- Blending - seamlessly intermixing inbound and outbound calls to the same agent pool optimizes inbound agent utilization and outbound agent skill sets
- Rapid Response to Internet Leads - ever increasing web traffic means ever increasing leads to be called, and the company that gets to a lead first wins a majority of the time
- Flexible Configuration - Being able to respond rapidly to opportunities and challenges can mean the difference between excelling and falling behind
- Built-in Outbound IVR - personalized messages and the option to speak with an agent often make outbound IVR a cost effective and efficient method of contact
- Support for Remote Agent Pools - Tapping into at-home and remote pools of agents often translates into better, happier, more skilled agents and often lower cost
- Compliance Control - recent changes to the FTC's TSR, policy statements by the UK's OfCom, cell phone privacy rules effect on debt collectors, nuisance law suits, and other compliance topics all drive outbound operations to know the rules and conventions and be able to manage and react accordingly
- Proactive Customer Care - intelligent use of customer data linked to outbound dialing can enable your company to contact customers just before they have a problem or when they have a need
- Dynamic Outbound ANI / Caller ID - being able to modify the caller ID for each call placed can greatly increase contact rates in some applications
How complete is your tool belt? What would you add to this set of tools?
Matt Taylor