Perhaps you remember one of our recent posts about the new regulatory requirements from the Telephone Consumer Protection ACT (TCPA) that has made it increasingly challenging for contact centers to engage in outbound activities? Today we're going to touch on some best practices to help you optimize your outbound dialing so that you can stay within compliance.
Best Practices to Optimizing Outbound Dialing
Outbound activities presents some unique challenges that are not present in the deployment of an inbound campaign. By using the right techniques and employing best practices, companies can avoid pitfalls that result in customer frustration and possible compliance issues.
- Focus on the Customer Experience: Provide highly personalized interactions that anticipate customer needs, diffuse frustrating situations, and streamline processes and improve agent efficiency. You also want to deliver it in a way that customers find it valuable - rather than a nuisance.
- Leverage Multi-Channel: Use a vendor that facilitates a consistent user interface across all customer service portals with little to no incremental effort, including voice, text messaging, instant message, mobile and even social networks. Chat with us in detail about your needs here.
- Schedule and Manage Appropriately: Use an intelligent platform to setup and schedule outbound campaigns, which will allow your agents to quickly send notifications or react to market opportunities. You can also use these as an opportunity to understand exactly how and why a call failed, effectively manage contact lists and remove bad contacts from future campaigns.
- Security: Contact centers need to avoid unintentionally violating a customer's privacy and validating the identity of the called party is often necessary, which often just needs to be contact verification steps.
Regulations in most countries also stipulate that a connection must be made in less than two seconds from the time the call is answered and sometimes require a recording and or archiving of both sides of an outbound call.
