How to Run a Successful Outbound Call Campaign in Your Call Center

By Harriet Phelps

The success of the outbound call campaign is defined by many factors. Here are some expert tips that can help you to turn them to your advantage.

What Is an Outbound Campaign and Where You Can Use It?

An outbound campaign is a campaign where agents make calls to potential or existing customers with the intention to make sales, generate more leads, market your brand, or conduct research.

According to The Inner Circle Guide to Outbound, the recent report from ContactBabel, the main types of outbound activities in US call centers are:

  • Callbacks about ongoing issues
  • Callbacks requested by customers
  • Sales calls to existing customers
  • Sales calls to potential new customers
  • Debt collection
  • Customer satisfaction surveys

Despite the different non-voice channels, calls are still relevant. Exhausted by numerous lockdowns, people are glad to hear a human voice instead of lines of text in the messenger. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t come across as too intrusive. Let’s try to find out how to organize and run a successful outbound call campaign.

How to Run a Successful Outbound Call Campaign in Your Call Center. Best Tips

1.   Set Objectives and Strategy

The first step is to set campaign objectives and then develop a strategy on how to achieve them. Data & Marketing Association (DMA) experts recommend considering the following questions while setting your campaign objectives:

  • What do you want to achieve from your campaign?
  • How will your campaign benefit your customer?
  • Are your objectives measurable?
  • Are your objectives achievable?
  • How many dials and decision-making contacts (DMCs) will be required?
  • What conversion rates are achievable?
  • What quality objectives should you establish, in addition to the financials?
  • What valuable customer insight can you collect during the call and how will it help you to improve your customer’s experience in future campaigns?

If you are satisfied with the answers, proceed to campaign strategy. Its specifics depend on your business goals but there are key principles you should follow:

  • Put your customer first: respect their right to say NO
  • Be honest and fair
  • Provide excellent communication
  • Encourage conversation over conversion: find balance when setting time frames for outbound calls and don’t make customers “hostages” on the phone
  • Keep promises you give during the call

2.   Create a Call Script

With a good and well-structured call script, you are more likely to close the deal. To write it, study the needs of your prospective customers, prepare answers to their potential questions and objections. Our versatile VoIP contact center solution allows you to quickly create scripts from different blocks (knowledge base, poll, proposal, HTML iframe) that are displayed in the agent interface during calls. It will save your employees time as they don’t need to switch between different applications.

3.   Deal with Management Concerns

Now it’s time to think about campaign management. Here is a list of steps you should take:

  • Choose the dialing strategy. The first thing that determines your dialing strategy is the size of your contact list. According to it, you should choose the number of agents you need and the dialing mode you will use. It is also important to decide how much time your campaign will take.
  • Handle the data you use. Check the accuracy of data from your contact list and provide their security to avoid data breaches from agents’ side. Our solution allows you to do that by hiding phone numbers both partially and completely.
  • Ensure legal compliance. Make sure that data from your contact list aren’t in the Do Not Call (DNC) list or other registries for customers who do not want to receive unsolicited or marketing calls. Check out if your dialing software is set up according to the telemarketing regulations of the particular region.

4.   Choose a Suitable Dialing Mode

There are three dialing modes that your outbound call center service can use when running campaigns. Each of them has its specifics and is suitable for certain types of calls.

  • Preview dialing means that the system displays customer details before the call and it’s up to the agent to decide to call or not to call. This mode is good for complex sales as it gives time to think before a conversation.
  • Progressive dialing (Power dialing) means that the system makes one call at a time and filters out all the busy signals, no-answers, and answer machines. This dialer connects your available agents only with live calls that allows you to increase your contact rate. It’s a good mode for small teams (less than 5 agents).
  • Predictive dialing is the most advanced one. This dialer also has answering machine detection and connects your agents only with live calls but it can collect statistics on call duration. Based on this data, it can calculate the approximate time when an agent is about to be available and dial the next number from the list. The bigger your agent team is; the preciser the calculations are. Our predictive dialer can significantly increase your agent productivity as they don’t need to waste time waiting for the next call and stay motivated. It has flexible redialing rules so you can set any number of dialing attempts you wish.

5.   Define the Right Benchmarks

The efficiency of your outbound campaign depends on many factors but there are some of them you can pay attention to in the first place.

  • Contact list quality. Outdated or wrong contacts will negatively affect your campaign or make it doomed to fail.
  • Dialing mode. It influences your agents’ talking time and productivity. Unsuitable dialers can overload your employees and cause a big number of lost calls.
  • Average talk time. This time will be different for each type of campaign (sales, survey, or service). When you know the average talk time for non-decision makers and decision-makers it will help you to get more accurate campaign statistics.

Conclusion

Thorough planning and the right software are the key factors that determine the success of your campaign. We will be more than happy to offer you an efficient contact center solution that can help you to reach your goals.

Interesting Related Article: “How outbound call centers can help drive more sales for your business“