Enhancing Outreach: Key Features of Outbound Call Center Software

Outbound call center activities are key for quite a lot of business areas, including telemarketing, lead generation, debt collection, surveys, fundraising, or political campaigns, where agents contact a list of people with various goals in mind.

Managing these outbound activities can be tricky. It requires a solution that helps your agents be more productive, make more calls, and achieve business goals in less time. Ideally, your outbound call center software also provides a clear overview of your agents’ performance and enables supervisors to give them meaningful feedback or immediate in-call assistance if needed.

In addition, the right outbound call center software boosts productivity while ensuring that (potential) customers are not unnecessarily disturbed, protecting your business from losing its reputation.

In this article, you’ll find some call center software features that can enhance your outreach activities based on these aspects.

Dialing options

Depending on the type of campaigns you’re running, you may need a solution that provides manual (a.k.a preview) dialing and/or some form of auto dialer to optimize customer outreach.

Choosing the right type of dialer depends on various factors. If your agents have highly personalized conversations with a smaller database, manual or power dialing works best, as these options give them the ability to prepare for each call.

For projects with more than five agents, a larger database, and similar call lengths, a predictive dialer is recommended. In this case, the system initiates more calls than there are agents available and filters answering machines out, ensuring that agents spend as much time on live calls as possible. To avoid disturbing people in your campaign, some predictive dialers offer advanced settings, such as putting phone numbers on a “do not call” list if your system has contacted them previously without success.

In some cases, outbound calling can even be fully automated (e.g. surveying clients or sending payment notifications), and then, outbound IVR can be something to consider.

Call management features

To save costs and ensure your agents are only connected to live calls, pairing your automatic dialer with voicemail detection is a great solution. This self-learning feature spots voicemail indicators and handles them through the process of your choice - for example, by sending an SMS or scheduling a callback immediately.

It’s a common practice to record calls in a contact center for legal, quality assurance, and conflict resolution purposes. It’s important to know what type of call recording options are available (automated or manual), and what parameters you can specify in connection with call recordings (for example, when they should begin and end, how long the system should keep them available, or whether you want to archive or download old recordings).

When a call ends, agents can label it with the right shortcode (or disposition) to keep track of the outcome of the interaction. Dispositions reveal crucial information, such as whether the agent reached the contact, whether the call was successful, or whether a callback needs to be scheduled. This data keeps agents and supervisors informed, ensures each case is taken care of, and streamlines processes like reporting or compiling call lists.

Integrations

Connecting your contact center software with other systems can boost agent productivity and enable easy data synchronization.

Here are a few integrations that are typically used:

• CRM integration: syncing your CRM with your contact center software can help agents access valuable information during their calls (such as customer history, previous interactions, and purchase records), enabling them to have more personalized conversations without switching back and forth between two different systems. This type of integration also ensures data alignment in both your call center software and CRM after changes are made in either system.

  
  

• Speech analytics integration: connecting your call center software with speech analytics helps you track customer interactions, evaluate agent performance, and pinpoint recurring issues and trends. Some speech analytics systems even give recommendations on how to modify scripts to improve customer interactions.

  
  

• Electronic signature integration: some outbound campaigns may require contacts to sign documents such as sales contracts or new customer forms. In these cases, a solution with e-signature capability can speed up the process and make it more convenient for both agents and customers, as it erases the need for printing, scanning, back-and-forth email exchanges, or meeting in person just to sign a document.

Call monitoring

Real-time or live call monitoring lets you oversee agent status and activities or even listen to ongoing calls. With these capabilities, you can immediately update scripts, add customer information or reprioritize items. If your agent needs a supervisor’s help during a call, other useful features include…

• sending real-time messages
• call whispering
• joining the call so that both the agent and the customer can hear you.

Call monitoring serves as a valuable tool for quality management in various ways, such as providing timely and relevant feedback to agents, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, or offering tips on handling challenging situations.

Analytics

Having built-in analytics in your contact center solution helps you track metrics effortlessly. For outbound sales campaigns, some insightful KPIs include calls per agent, connection rate, average talk or handling time, average wait time, and conversion rate.

A great way to keep track of these KPIs is by using a customizable dashboard: many call center solutions have a wide array of metrics you can choose to display, and some of them even give you the option to set up your own custom KPIs.

Some systems even allow you to combine many KPIs from various channels or even multiple systems in one place so that you have a full overview of how your team is performing. With certain call center software solutions, it’s also possible to create dashboards that are visible to external viewers who are not logged in to the system. This can be handy in sharing your metrics with a wider group of colleagues.

All in all…

These are just a few examples of how your call center software features can support your outreach efforts.

As contact centers might take on various campaigns with different attributes simultaneously, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, if you opt for a highly customizable, easily scalable option, you’ll be able to navigate a diverse range of projects successfully using just one platform.