Outbound contact center basics

Outbound contact centers and their goals.

Outbound contact centers are focused on performing campaigns. Communication is initiated from somewhere within the company to deliver a message to a current or potential customer. The vastly preferred method for outbound contact is the telephone call, due, in part, to cultural reasons. Alternative outbound contact attempts such as email or instant messaging are very likely to be considered spam and quickly rejected. Therefore the outbound campaigns are usually performed by call centers exclusively.

The goals of an outbound campaign can be varied. Typical campaigns focus on sales, lead generation, personalized services, appointment setting, surveys and market research.

Sales campaigns typically focus on promoting the company’s products and services. Often they target new customers, trying to stimulate their interest in the features of whatever they want to sell. This practice is usually called lead generation, and is a marketing activity. Other than going for new customers through this method, companies frequently attempt cross selling (suggesting complementary products to a customer that has already decided to buy something) and upselling (persuading the customers to buy a complementary product or an upgrade that they did not originally wish to purchase). These techniques have proved very effective in practice, drastically increasing revenues.

Personalized services are another marketing tool that can be efficiently implemented via outbound call centers. Companies typically reach out to their most important customers making them new offers or even setting appointments if needed. Important customers are not only the ones generating most revenue, but often dissatisfied customers that have had problems in the past and have expressed some kind of complaints (though many companies tend to ignore that segment of their customer base, eventually losing them out to competitors).

Outbound call centers are also used for conducting surveys and market research. The results of these campaigns can measure public opinion on products and services and record other types of relevant data about customers. This information is critical for creating new business plans and designing new products and services, as well as improving existing ones.

There is also a whole breed of outbound call centers that handle collection campaigns from people that owe money to a company. These call centers have rapidly increased in terms of both amount and activity since the outbreak of the global crisis in 2008, as companies are starving for cash.

The heart of outbound contact centers: the predictive dialer.

Outbound call centers are powered up by a computerized system that automatically initiates outbound calls, the dialer. Originally, an auto dialer was used, which simply initiated calls for idle agents. Today, most call centers performing outbound campaigns use a predictive dialer. The predictive dialer uses a variety of algorithms, taking into account historical and real-time data from reporting solutions, to predict availability of resources and aggressively push for maximum efficiency.

The typical predictive dialer supports/performs the following functions: it monitors how the calls it makes are answered, discards unanswered calls, busy signals, fax machines and other automated services and only connects calls that are answered by people. The predictive algorithms try to match the expected number of calls answered by people with the number of available agents at any point. The calls attempted by the predictive dialer are thus a lot more than the available agents. This automation saves significant agent time and results in substantially more productive agents (agent talk time can increase by more than 100%).

Aggressive usage of the predictive dialer (the intensity of outbound calls performed compared to available agents is usually controlled by real-time configurable parameters) can lead to call abandonment. This happens when the predictive algorithm fails to match correctly the successful number of calls it attempts to the available agents, resulting in silence from the moment the customer picks up the phone until (s)he is connected to a representative. This is extremely annoying to the customer (some call centers address this by initiating the call using an IVR-automated message in case an agent is not readily available) and in many countries it is addressed by legislation (allowed abandonment rates are usually 3% or less).