Predictive Dialer Feature Article

Oscar Pet Foods is increasing sales and customer loyalty with a new inbound/outbound contact center management system from Amcat. The technology will enable the direct sales company that specialises in home delivered pet foods, to develop new sales leads for its 80 franchises, improve order response handling and build on-going brand loyalty with its 45,000 customers.

Customer Management Center Manager at Oscar Pet Foods, Tim Klapproth commented, Today, our customers expect proactive service. Our new Amcat contact management system allows us to manage our customer base precisely. The database capabilities of the Amcat system are extensive. Through the on-screen agent applications, we can easily see what was ordered previously and can suggest new products. The database also allows us to segment our customers by geography, product or other criteria. Our previous technology was limited and only allowed us to either dial out or take incoming calls, but not both. This resulted in us providing a service to our inbound customers that we were not happy with, and increased workload for our other departments. Also, because the system was hosted off-site it was prone to downtime so we decided that an in-house system would be more reliable and more cost-effective as the business grew.

Oscars is taking advantage of Amcats call blending functionality, allowing agent to handle both inbound and outbound projects at the same time. When an inbound call comes in, Oscars can always answer calls within 10 seconds. When inbound calls are in a slack period, these same agents can work on proactive customer care contact campaigns to secure new orders. This helps optimise customer development for its franchises.

Klapproth comments, Right from the start, I was very impressed by the response I received from Amcat. Their attitude was very positive, and the Amcat Contact Centre Suite product demonstrated an extensive range of inbound & outbound features. Another key factor was that our IT resources are restricted, therefore the system needed to be very reliable and easy to operate. Amcat met both of these requirements.

The first campaign that the Amcat system will run is called Relay. Oscar Pet Foods divides the day into calling existing customers for new orders and calling new customers to introduce the company and its products. This process is critical to building strong relationships between regional customers and their local franchise partners. The Amcat system enables Oscar to build campaigns that target postcode specific areas, so in turn they can pass on leads to franchisees in a range of different locations.

According to Klapporth, the Relay campaign is the first step. Oscars is planning to double the size of their contact centre in the near future and introduce new campaigns such as, win back, designed to regain customers who have moved onto other competing brands.

Klapporth sums up the new opportunities the Amcat solution provides, The implementation of the Amcat system has opened up a number of future possibilities for our business. Apart from the ability to introduce new campaigns quickly and effectively, it will allow us to attain and build on our high customer retention rates, introduce web-based marketing programmes and expand the business further.