Outbound Outreach Helps with Omnichannel Customer Support
November 24, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
While businesses today are scrambling to craft a viable omnichannel customer experience, many of them are forgetting a very important element of omnichannel: outbound. Omnichannel is defined as the ability to service customers wherever they are: on the telephone, on the Web site, on e-mail, on the mobile app or in social media. A truly all-encompassing plan, however, should include an outbound outreach element that is timely and well-crafted. For many companies, reaching out to once-regular customers who have gone silent can be a lucrative effort.
Outbound contact center services provider Unitel recently announced a new business model that contains something the company calls a “customer reactive engine.” Re-capturing those subscription customers that mysteriously disappear is a critical element to any omnichannel customer support program.
"Over the last several years, we’ve been testing and refining a process that means proven predictable results for businesses to help re-activate inactive customers, and it has become an integral part of our strategy" said George Faltaous, CEO of Unitel.
The company uses dedicated teams for individual clients, and emphasizes outbound outreach as strongly as the inbound customer experience. According to Unitel, the result is far higher close rates that can help amp up a client’s revenue. And while outsourcing customer support is not for everyone, smaller companies that handle their own outbound outreach in-house can benefit from newer outbound technologies that make it easier to connect at the right time. Outbound solutions providers such as inContact offer progressive, predictive and preview dialing capabilities that can be easily integrated with the primary contact center platform. These solutions can be added seamlessly, and provide a way for dedicated outbound agents, or inbound agents who require tasks when inbound call volume is low, to reach out to customers proactively.
Many companies shy away from dialer technology because they remember the dialers of the 1980s and 1990s, which led to a lot of latency (delayed pick-up of the call by agents) or call abandons. Today, many providers build something called “call progress analysis” into their outbound solutions. This technology monitors calls to determine which outbound calls are likely to result in a conversation, and eliminates the delay, ensuring that an agent is available when the called party picks up. Agents are connected at the first hello, which paves the way for better outcomes and higher conversion rates. The cloud-based nature of the solutions makes it easy to change and manage outbound campaigns, and regulatory safeguards protect against placing illegal calls to numbers on do-not-call registries, or other restricted numbers.
The results are that agent productivity is maximized, revenue opportunities are not missed, and the customer relationship can be carefully cultivated to include proactive outreach as well as inbound excellence. If your company is looking for a way to bring customer relationships to a new level, look to outbound services or solutions that can help complete the omnichannel picture.