Proactive Contact
Proactive contact encompasses a wide range of communication objectives. These include debt collection, relationship building, growing customer value and delivering event triggered information updates. Each has their own set of operational and technical issues.
Probably the longest standing form of outbound communication is debt collection which becomes even more critical in times of economic downturn. However, the tightening screw of regulators, and the general adversity that consumers feel towards unsolicited communication makes the effectiveness of traditional, dialler based outbound campaigns increasingly difficult.
Outbound voice dialling is therefore evolving and evidence that SMS originated campaigns can deliver healthy response rates is growing due to its non-intrusive form of contact and customer propensity to respond to text messages more quickly.
This extension into multi media communication is also being supplemented with a variety of technologies to make campaign strategies more intelligent. Best “Time To Call” applications can assist in pre and post campaign analysis as can propensity modelling.
However, it is important to consider during the technical planning phase that actual improvements in ‘right party contacts’ also require a corresponding uplift in resource planning competency since agents need to be scheduled to suit contact patterns rather than standard shift patterns. This means workforce management planning systems should be reviewed as part of the scope.
Relationship building and sales campaigns to increase customer value are similar in terms of multi media use and segmentation. Both need a fully thought through customer contact strategy which has considered all the technical issues of being able to drive segment based communication.
Event Triggered Communications
Finally, event triggered communication is set to become a major element of customer service provision. First generation examples are based on simple integration between back office systems and automated communication alerts such as SMS or voice messages.
In these examples, timely proactive contact pre-empts any need the customer has to make an inbound enquiry. Although simple in so far that they are one way alerts, they can be a very cost effective way of reducing inbound call handling and also satisfying customer expectations for prompt communication.
Second generation services will come on stream as technical environments convert to open architectures powered by SIP and SOA. In this scenario, analysis of the conditions that lead to an event triggered communication can be vastly more sophisticated and therefore its perceived value is increased.
This generation of proactive communication also known as ‘communication enabled business processes’ is also able to move beyond simple one way alerts and offer the recipient an interactive menu of self service and live service options to choose from and therefore immediately respond to the situation. In this way proactive contact can be used to drive greater use of self service.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Proactive Contact.