Outbound Communications:  Are you pushing customers away or reaching out?

Proactively reaching out to customers and constituents is an important way to show them you appreciate them. 

While not everybody’s ready to be barraged by SMS just yet, everyone you care about has a telephone.  And undoubtedly you have something to tell them:    

• Perhaps your message is very time sensitive.  The school bus is delayed 20 minutes because of the weather and folks shouldn’t be sending their kids out to the curb in the -35 degree weather just yet.
• Maybe your message has the potential to generate incremental revenue.  You want to remind parents that they can refill their child’s ala carte lunch fund.
• Maybe you can reduce the number of incoming calls and therefore the number of agents staffed in the contact center.  You warn people that the street sweepers are coming through tomorrow afternoon and you don’t want to tow their car, but you will if they don’t heed your proactive warning.

Regardless of your message, your outbound campaign must work the way you planned in order to justify investments you’ve made in the technology, planning and people.   In any economy, it is critical that your communications with customers and constituents go smoothly.  In a down economy, it may be even more critical
as your need to drive communications to less expensive channels increases.  A March 2009 Datamonitor study predicts that the outbound dialer market will experience growth over the next five years as companies are forced to “do more with less.” (The study also anticipates seeing a decrease in predictive dialer sales as a result of stiffer FTC rules for telemarketers that take effect in October.

What is the use in being proactive if your message doesn’t get through or get to the right person or get through in time?  When it comes to Outbound Dialer and Outbound IVR solutions, you may have a variety of concerns:

• Is your message time sensitive? 
• Could your message generate revenue? 
• If your message gets through, can you reduce the number of agents on hand in the contact center? 
• How will your system react to dogs barking or babies crying during a live answer?

Whatever your concerns or objectives, your outbound communications must get through in order for you to realize customer satisfaction, revenue and cost savings returns.   So you must find a way to assure your outbound campaign is executed the way you planned -- before you run it!

Outbound & Predictive Dialer StressTest™ performance validation services provide a cost-effective means to do just that.  You get to test drive your outbound campaign and observe, tune and validate solution performance before you turn it loose on real customers/constituents.

Chances are you will want to test drive your system using a controlled suite of answer profiles and post-answer treatments.  And maybe you will want IQ Services to throw in a barking dog or washing machine just to be safe.  Whatever the case, IQ Services provides precise results you can use to proactively assess and tweak performance.  You will know it all works together before you turn it loose and that it’s FTC Guideline compliant to boot. 

How does IQ Services do this?  We have hundreds of individually dialable ANIs configured to answer incoming calls and respond like real customers.  During these calls, we capture data about your system’s performance from the customer perspective so you’ll be able to determine whether or not it will deal with real customers as you expect.

Typically, IQ Services configures your test in one of two ways.  Either the ANIs are configured to your detailed, precise requirements or to reflect your general expectations without revealing the exact details until after the test.  In either case, you tell us how the dialer is supposed to respond to different conditions (e.g., a live answer vs. an automated answer) and we provide test results that detail how your solution treated each call and whether or not it responded as expected.  You know right away how accurate your call classification algorithm is at detecting the various pre-configured conditions.

IQ Services flexible testing process is configured to meet your unique test objectives and concerns with techniques such as:

• Varying the time to answer
• Configuring conditions such as ring-no answer (RNA), destination busy (60 ipm), and answer followed by silence 
• Offering SIT tones after returning answer supervision (depending on what trips your call classification process)
• Playing carefully prerecorded greetings to represent the conditions you expect your dialer to encounter when calling real customers: 
• live answer on a landline or mobile phone
• auto voice in the form of cheesy answering machines
• professional business or central office voicemail
• the Octel kiss and more

Everything is fully automated so you receive the precision and detail you expect including real-time online test results, complete digital audio recordings, step-by-step response times, and step-by-step response validation.

And if you want to make sure you’re FTC compliant, IQ Services can help there too (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/08/tsr.shtm).  We can let you know how many calls were answered after 4 ring cycles (since the dialer should have hung up).  We can also report on whether or not your voice or key-press opt-out mechanism allowed the calling party to barge-in at any time during the call to be put on your “do not call” list - followed by immediate disconnect.  When a live answer is offered, IQ Services can tell you if the called party got to an agent or stand-in recording within 2 seconds.  We can also provide you with the percentage of nuisance calls.

If your outbound solution is integrated with screen-pop and agent routing, the IQ Services test case can be configured to confirm that the correct screen and data popped for the correct agent.  IQ Services’ Outbound & Predictive Dialer Solution StressTest™ can be configured to interact with an IVR process for virtually any purpose – to confirm a pre-scheduled delivery time, pay a past-due bill, offer a political preference, or even order the latest trinket from the Franklin Mint.

As you already know, your customers’ experiences still matter even when you are the one placing the call.  If you are going to proactively communicate with customers, you need to proactively assure a good customer experience.   You need customer experience performance validation services to make sure that when you reach out to customers you don’t end up pushing them away.

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