Supply Relevant, Personalized Information with Outbound Notifications
Offering the best possible customer experience requires more than staffing a contact center and waiting for calls to arrive. Increasingly, customers expect to be contacted proactively with the information they want and need. Businesses are realizing the benefits, both in terms of increased customer loyalty and actual cost savings.
Outbound notifications provide customers with information before they ask. As a bonus, they can generate cost savings by modulating inbound call center traffic. When a contact center is quiet, an outbound application which offers an option to speak with an agent can be launched, resulting in fewer calls and lower staffing levels during busy hours.
Outbound notifications offer a multimedia information delivery service with a full featured campaign manager. Application-defined information may be sent using a variety of media such as phone, text message, and email, and can be sent on a one-by-one basis, or broadcast to tens of thousands of recipients. Installation options include hosted/cloud, on-premise or a hybrid arrangement.
A Notification Campaign
An outbound notification campaign is comprised of a list of contacts and set of rules for how those contacts are to be reached. These rules include the media to be used, media specific parameters, and any restrictions on the way that messages are to be handled over that media.
A notification campaign is extremely flexible and supports a wide range of notices such as:
- Announcing a 48-hour sale to your customer base
- Notifying parents and students of a special testing schedule or school closing
- Warning utility customers of a scheduled outage with restoration notifications
- Informing Pharmacy customers that a prescription is ready for pickup
A campaign may be large or small, one time or continuous. Campaigns can manage real-time notifications which may be sent one at a time or in batches.
Phone Calls
An outbound notification works with the Call Progress Detection (CPD) capabilities of the underlying IVR platform to monitor every outbound call in order to determine whether or not the call is successful. If a call fails due to a transient problem (e.g. the destination phone is busy), the service schedules the call to be retried. In addition, campaigns can be configured to call during certain hours only and within the desired time zone of each contact.
SMS Messages
Outbound notifications sent as text messages are very efficient. They can be reviewed at the recipient’s convenience, while a phone call must be answered in real time or ignored and later fetched from voicemail. And when the URL of a mobile web page is included, even more detailed information can be provided to the customer.
If you are interested in including outbound notification capabilities in your Contact Center, please Contact Waterfield today.