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What is Outbound Call center cyr

What is outbound call center?

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Call centers communicate with their customers to resolve their grievances through phone calls. Outbound Call Centers imply that the agents make calls to their customers/clients instead of receiving calls from them. The aim of outbound call centers is to make sales, provide service, conduct research, or receive feedback. 

What is Outbound Call center1

Outbound call centers are generally used for

  • Market Research
  • Lead 
  • Customer Service
  • Debt Management/ Collection
  • Customer Survey
  • Follow up 
  • Booking Appointments

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How does an Outbound Call Center create agent and employee satisfaction?

Skilled and trained agents who can confidently place calls and hold conversations with clients/customers can bring success and meet business goals. Depending on both, the agents and the software tools can lead to the steady and efficient working of the call center.

Additionally, implementing agent performance reporting and management tools can aid the supervisor to track the agents’ work performance. The supervisors/managers can monitor the outbound calls and supply them with coaching and training. 

Moreover, tracking outbound calls can indicate patterns in customer sentiment and provide customer insights that can help supervisors to make well-informed decisions. Training agents with relevant skills and insights to generate successful leads will lead to satisfied agents. Satisfied agents prove to be productive which will contribute to satisfied customers.

Features of an Outbound Call Center

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Contact Import: The agent should be able to import the existing contacts in the database as a CSV or spreadsheet instead of copy-pasting. 

Customer Call History: A view in the dashboard of the previous conversation between the agents and the client/customer. It should also include the conversations that the customer may have had with other agents as well as any special request made by the customer.

CRM Integration: CRM can provide all available information about the customer from the system.

Call Recording: Record all the conversations the agents have with the customers for analysis and reporting. 

Call Conferencing: Call conference feature would allow a supervisor or other agent to join the call in case help is required. 

Key metrics of an Outbound Call Center you should be aware of

Outbound call centers involve measuring some KPIs for the steady operation of the call center. The senior management including the supervisor and managers should analyze these KPIs to ensure the business goal is properly met. 

Average Handle Time

    • AHT implies the duration of a call required in customer interaction. Closing the deal in the first contact is a metric every agent wants to achieve. While it is difficult to achieve such a first-call resolution in certain scenarios, it boosts the revenue of the company. 

Conversion Rate 

    • Conversion rate suggests the calls which successfully result in sales or the intended purpose of the call. A low conversion rate can result in an increase in cost-per-lead. This indicates that the agents may be dialing more customers but failing to close the deal. 
    • To achieve a high conversion rate, you need to monitor the reason for failure. Also, help the agents nurture the skills required for successful conversion. Your business revenue is more dependent on conversion rate and so, it is important to keep track of it all the time. 

First Call Resolution

    • When an agent makes a call to a customer or client and manages to successfully convert that one call to a lead, it is defined as first call resolution. Requiring no callbacks to make a lead is an achievement that requires skills and intelligence. 
    • Monitoring agents while they achieve such metrics can be useful. These skills and experience can be shared with other agents in the department. 

Call Abandoned Rate

    • When a caller answers a call but instead of an agent talking they hear silence, this leads to abandoning the call. Customers don’t want to be put on hold or face an awkward silence. The call center must ensure that calls are made when an agent is at the desk to engage in conversation. The routing of the calls should also be connected to live agents. 

How to manage an Outbound Call Center?

What is Outbound Call center3

Automate Dialing

  • The volume of calls depends upon what business sector a call center works for. Moreover, a call center aims to save time for an agent to ensure that the call is productive and worthwhile. What better method to save time than utilizing auto dialing? Particularly, predictive dialer and power dialer can help take the workload off of the agent’s shoulders. 
  • A predictive dialer is optimized to predict the availability of the agent and dial the customer contact. Moreover, it only passes those calls to the agent which connect to an actual person, i.e. it filters out bad connections. This saves a lot of time for the agent and the agent can focus on the conversation. 

Omnichannel Features

  • The omnichannel contact center provides several features that can track and monitor every customer interaction, and their outcomes across multiple channels. A single dashboard can give employees access to connect with the customers through any channel preferred by the customer. 
  • If required, omnichannel also allows you to switch channels without disrupting the communication.
  • By integrating it with CRM, you can feed all the information from the Omnichannel platform into it for future reference.

Lead-centric tools to boost Outbound conversion rates

  • Collecting all the available information on prospective customers/clients can help an agent to personalize a conversation to warm up to the customer. Gathering those data from company websites, social media, news or even third-party is a smart move to ensure that the agent’s call can boost the conversion rate. 

Schedule Call-backs

  • Callbacks are sometimes good, especially when they are to remind customers of their bill payment or exceeding due payments. Customers feel grateful and valued when the company prioritizes them. By scheduling call-backs, you can improve the customer experience.
  • When the customers feel valued, they often praise the company which can boost customer satisfaction. As a result,it contributes to enhancing the reputation of the company. 

Analyze the KPI Metrics 

  • The call center can produce reports on agent performance, but it is important that the supervisors can read and understand the report. With the data-driven report, you can prepare a well-informed strategy and make decisions which bring results. 
  • Agent productivity, calls abandoned report, call duration report, etc, are all such metrics that should be studied to identify the reason for lacking in the final results.
  •  In case of successful conversions, the reports must also be analyzed and shared among the agents. This can train them in acquiring the skills that resulted in successful leads. 

Integrate CRM for agent efficiency

  • The best way to teach an agent is to let them experience the entire process and analyze the workings of the call center. The agents, when they observe the customer’s journey, can analyze the touchpoints and understand their reason to stay with the company. When the agent understands a customer’s perspective it can boost the agent’s motivation. 
  • Moreover, with agents having access to all the information about the client/customer they can spend time preparing for a meaningful conversation. They can engage in a personalized conversation. It enables them to create a comfortable relationship with the customer before beginning the cold process of business. 

Speech Analytics

  • Training an agent should be a continuous process. The training session of the agent should not be scheduled as a one-time thing. There is an advantage if the new agents are trained by the top performing agents and senior agents in the department. 
  • Moreover, speech analytics can not only track the calls but also identify phraseology in successful calls. The agents can be taught the way to skillfully use words in a conversation to land successful conversions.

Best Practices for Outbound Call Center

What is Outbound Call center4
  • Use outbound calls to collect feedback: Asking your customers for feedback is an important and game-changing aspect of the outbound call center. Assigning a team of agents to monitor customer feedback and take note of issues while also resolving them portrays your company in a good light. Satisfied with the service, customers will become loyal promoters of your company. 
  • Do not let any lead go: Keeping track of leads is as important as making calls for leads. You may have received calls during non-business hours which could be a potential lead. Agents can be instructed to schedule a follow-up for those leads that they missed. This way, the agents can engage with customers/clients at the earliest and convert them to successful deals.
  • Avoid Long Talks: In order to warm up with the customer/client, don’t overdo the small talk. You need to begin with a comfortable conversation; however, the customer/client is well aware of the intention of the call. Hence, it is better to get to the point instead of engaging in chit-chat.

This brings us to the next technique.

  • Send a Warm-up Message before you Call: Instead of spending your time contemplating how to hold a call conversation, you can send the prospect a message via text or email to ensure that the customer attends the call. You can customize messages with the help of the intel collected by the system to boost your chances of converting the call to a lead. 
  • Show empathy to objections: The best way to handle an objection and ensure that the customer keeps on the line is to tell them you understand how they feel. Engaging with a person by telling them you understand their point-of-view, you can convince the customer to stay on call. 
  • Divide the Task within Agents: Sometimes, without properly prepared scripts, agents may find it difficult to handle certain outbound calls. Moreover, the results can also differ from what you expected if you don’t provide a detailed algorithm for every aspect of calls. It is best advised to separate work among different agents who best suit the task. 
  • Train the agents while on the job: Don’t wait for the employee to start their first day of training. It is more impactful if they train while they are on call. Assign a senior agent or manager to assist them with calls and teach them the skills and tricks required to make successful calls.

It often takes more than a month for an agent to become productive. It is beneficial for the contact center to shorten this time period by giving them more hands-on experience.

Tips for Outbound Call Center

List of Potential Leads

    • Creating a list of prospective customers who show interest in your offer can prove to be beneficial when your agents need to generate leads. The services offered by your company are the same as what they need.
    •  So, you can take advantage and offer a consultant to them, while also closing the deal.

Local Area Code:

    • We all accept calls from a recognizable number rather than an unknown number. It is the same with the customer. Getting a VoIP service to support your outbound calls can prove to be beneficial. 
    • While making an international call, the software displays local area codes instead of international codes. The customers would more likely pick the call with the local area code. The agent can also have an easy conversation. 

Learn Proper Voice:

    • As a call center agent, it is important that their voices command attention. The right tone, pitch, and inflection can showcase your confidence and can influence your customer/client. By recording calls and analyzing how you approach, you can develop a confident vocal dynamic.

Don’t Interrupt:

    • Customers don’t appreciate when an agent completes their sentence that is different from what they want to say. This causes a bad relationship between the agent and customer.
    •  It is better to advise the agents to listen completely to what the customer wants to say and not interrupt. The customer may disconnect the call if the agent interrupts their sentences. This can negatively impact the company’s reputation.

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