By understanding the reason for outbound calling and what efforts go behind a functional outbound call center, you can determine if it is the correct time to outsource it for your business. In addition, knowing the best practices and the right technologies will guide you toward capitalizing on the prospects and profits of outbound calls.
An outbound contact center is a business operation role that hires customer support agents and sales representatives to make outgoing calls to customers, prospects, or other companies.
Outbound call centers may make outbound calls exclusively, or they may fuse outbound and inbound areas. Usually, an outbound contact center also performs inbound roles. They have different processes for different roles. An outbound department mainly focuses on sales and marketing. Based on the type of business and size of the company, outsourced outbound services can be used to perform the following tasks:
- Telemarketing
- Cold Calls
- Customer Service
- Market Research
- Updating Consumer data
- Surveys outreach
- Notifying customers
- Requesting information from other companies
- Post-sale follow-ups
But an outbound contact center can only accomplish its objective when it is competent and effective. By using metrics and KPIs to calculate an outbound job’s performance, organizations will escalate the customer experience, which positively impacts their retention rates and status.
Ways to Measure The Usefulness of Outbound Calls
There are numerous ways to find out if your outsourced outbound services are driving results or not in terms of customer service, activity and productivity. A futurist contact center has innovative technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence-based training and processes to drive results. The clients are provided with a dashboard to track the progress – average calling time, cost per lead and numerous other stats that ensure success.
If you outsource inbound calling as well, which most organizations do, your dashboard will help you assess customer service. It will also tell you the percentage of missed calls, cross-sell and upsell success rate, and inquiries converted to sales. As said, most BPO providers offer a combined service of inbound and outbound functions. However, you can also choose the services you want. Within outbound support, you can also hire dedicated or shared resources as per your requirement and budget. The more specific you are in the SLAs, the easier it becomes to measure the outbound results.
Assess your productivity by monitoring the average number of calls per user and the average duration of outbound calls. If you divide the total number of calls in a day by the number of call agents that made calls that day, you will get the average call duration. Numbers are valuable data for outbound contact center services. These are the benchmarks that set the objective and boost performance. Accordingly, outbound calls are adjusted and calling approaches are modified to fit your business needs and goals.