by Glen Taylor, PhD, Solutions Architect at Interactive Northwest, Inc.
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Developing a well-thought-out strategy for maintaining healthy customer relationships in today’s media saturated world is more important than ever. Savvy business leaders are turning to proactive customer engagement as an effective tool for maintaining brand loyalty. By anticipating customer needs and providing valuable information right when it’s needed, organizations stay ahead of potential frustrations that could occur by waiting for customers to make contact as issues arise.
If your organization hasn’t yet embraced proactive outreach, you may be wondering just how to go about developing a strategy that makes sense for your business needs. Getting it right from the beginning builds in efficiencies, curtails redundancy, and avoids costly changes down the road. Let’s explore the critical steps required when developing an effective outreach solution.
1. Identify Opportunities
Look for activities within your organization that would benefit from proactive outreach. Perhaps you are already calling customers manually or have a high volume of calls about a particular topic like claim status or repair completion dates. You most likely have information customers would value even if they aren’t asking about it, such as appointment reminders, membership renewals, or bills that are almost due. Key questions to ask when evaluating if an activity would benefit from proactive outreach include:
- Will reaching out benefit your organization as well as your customer?
- Will your customer find this outreach more helpful than intrusive?
- Will the information help your customer avoid fees or save them money?
- Will the contact prevent potential hassles, frustration, or save your customer time?
2. Determine Delivery Methods
Once you’ve identified proactive outreach opportunities, the next step is to determine the most appropriate method of delivery.
Automated Outreach: Information is delivered via voice, email, or SMS without agent participation. Automated outreach is the most efficient method of reaching out to customers, allowing organizations to quickly provide reminders, notifications, and important updates.
Self-Service Assisted Outreach: In many cases, it may be beneficial to allow customers to respond to an automated call. Providing self-service options for customers to confirm appointments, pay bills, or renew memberships enables customers to respond to an automated message any time of day without involving an agent.
Agent Assisted Outreach: Customers may need to interact with your staff following an automated outbound call to change an appointment, discuss options, or answer related questions. To accommodate this, the automated system will need the ability to transfer calls to agents who are prepared to help the customer.
Agent Based Outreach: Some outbound campaigns will require agents to initiate the customer interaction. Preview dialing enables agents to prepare for the calls ahead of time; while progressive or predictive dialing methods ensure a contact is on the line before passing them to to an available agent. Progressive and predictive dialing are ideal for outbound campaigns where preparation on the part of the agent is not required.
>> Learn more about delivery methods including preview, progressive, and predictive dialing <<
3. Establish a Compliance Practice
One of the most important considerations often overlooked when implementing an outbound solution is developing a compliance and risk management strategy. There are a number of legal requirements that must be understood and taken into account. The primary federal law regarding proactive outreach is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). In addition, various states have enacted their own statutes regarding who an enterprise can call, when they can call, and the number of call attempts that can be made. Although most proactive outreach is completely legal when TCPA and other regulations are observed, it is necessary to understand and obey these regulations. Ensure that your legal and risk management departments are engaged throughout your project.
4. Engage all Stakeholders
Proactive outreach projects normally involve a number of functional groups within an organization. While there may be a business unit that has the underlying need and that will guide setting the requirements for the project, it is important to consider all of the groups who will be touched by the final solution. Marketing, sales, and support teams are likely to be important stakeholders; certainly contact center agent groups and any existing dialer teams will need to be involved. If the solution interacts with core business systems, the participation of one or more IT organizations may be required. Regardless of which organization will own the solution, soliciting input from all affected parties will ensure a smooth implementation down the road.
5. Develop Comprehensive Procedures
Successful outbound campaigns comprise a complex web of interdependent parts. It is important to develop a clearly defined process along with procedures to ensure that all of your outbound requirements have been taken into account. Consider each aspect of the implementation, including platform administration, list creation and management, and training of staff and agent teams, as well as documenting all of the steps you are taking to ensure that you are compliant with legal requirements.
Take the Plunge
If the time is spent to identify the right opportunities, select the correct methods, understand the legal requirements, and put the right processes in place to integrate a proactive outreach solution into your organization, the results can be extremely effective. Showing your customers that you care enough to anticipate and meet their needs elevates your customers’ experience with your organization resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Judicious use of customer outreach can result in increased revenue by extending customer lifetime value and increasing operational efficiency. As a result, proactive outreach solutions frequently pay for themselves rather quickly.
INI has developed a comprehensive outbound practice for automated and agent-based outreach. Consult with an INI solutions expert to see how easy it can be to implement an effective customer outreach solution.
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