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Outbound Dialling Benefits

When we think of outbound dialling, we often think of debt recovery, where the customer's feelings fall second to recovering outstanding money, or telesales where it’s all about reaching as many people as possible.

In today's competitive environment, it is no longer sufficient to advertise and expect the market to come to us by way of an incoming call. The Internet allows customers to instantly find alternatives. Existing customers need to be stroked occasionally to encourage them to be loyal, and as fewer new customers find us, we have to go in search of them.

Customer retention

Customer retention is far more cost-effective than attempting to win new business. As a result, companies are proactively making contact with their customer base more frequently in order to increase customer service. As well as increasing the number of touch points with the customer, proactive outbound dialling can also be used to increase the revenue derived from your customer base by up-selling or cross-selling new products to your existing customers.

Outbound dialling should be a core part of any organisation's go-to-market strategy. It’s a way of developing valuable customer relationships, and done properly, it’s an effective way of getting the appropriate proposition to an accurately targeted market.

With all of the systems we have in place regarding customer relationship management, policies, loyalty schemes, frequent-flier programmes, etc, we keep very close tabs on our customers. When, however, was the last time you got a call from your favourite airline enquiring why you had not been flying recently, or from your supermarket asking why you are no longer using your Nectar card, etc?

Many businesses have a customer retention team in place, yet most of these are only reactive to the customer deciding to move away. With the cost of winning new customers so high, surely there is a need for us to be more proactive?

Customer acquisition

Acquiring new customers is most definitely a "hunting" exercise and it’s not necessarily a case of get your proposition right and they will find you. Off-the-page advertising, TV advertising, direct mail or eShots all raise awareness of you, but with so much choice available to consumers, very seldom do organisations get more than a fraction of a percent responding to a call to action.

The smart organisations are identifying the "sweet spot" in terms of their proposition, specialised car insurance, over 50s holidays, etc. Segmenting your target audience with a highly targeted and differentiated proposition enables you to turn the whole UK population into a manageable set of potential prospects.

By following up direct or email marketing with a telephone call you can increase interest ten- fold, especially if the follow-up is performed in a timely manner. These metrics change the game and suddenly make outbound telemarketing a cost-effective part of the marketing mix.

Website browsers to buyers

We've all done it. We are browsing a website, we have a real interest but we cannot find the information we need or have questions that the website just does not answer. What do we do? We leave that site and move to the next one; after all, there is plenty of choice around.

Over the past couple of years, a number of companies have connected their websites to their contact centre. Some simply put a "Call Me" button on the site; the customer clicks the button, enters their details and then receives an outbound call from the provider. Others are being even smarter, they are collecting the customer's name and contact phone number very early in the browsing/quote cycle. If the customer abandons the process, they are then passing this through to the contact centre for an outbound call. It is also possible to instigate a web chat with the person browsing.

There are recent examples where organisations have converted over 20 percent of abandoned browsers into sales, simply by injecting the human touch into the process.

Automate Dialling

Trying to put some of these outbound activities in place with manual dialling makes them cost-prohibitive. Punching in numbers from a list and listening to a ringing tone is both monotonous and time consuming. By automating the dialling process, even by "click to dial" from a screen, you can reduce non-productive time by 100 percent. By using predictive dialling, productivity can be increased by as much as 300 percent.

If we take this into account, we suddenly find that our outbound agents have more time or that we are able to do some of the above activity with little investment in staff; this represents a sound return on investment that surely cannot be ignored.

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