OUTBOUND
Millions of U. S. consumers, for example, are researching major purchases every day: new roofs, mortgage refinancing, insurance policies, solar installations, and other significant financial decisions.
These consumers often don’ t have time to call multiple businesses themselves and wait in IVR queues. Instead, they welcome outreach from companies offering relevant solutions.
The companies that succeed in these high-velocity outbound sales environments have developed sophisticated operational capabilities. These are capabilities that modern CX teams can learn from, as I will discuss later.
3. COMPLIANCE COMPLEXITY
Outbound calling and texting are also subject to extensive regulatory oversight:
• The primary governing laws and regulations in the U. S. are the FCC’ s Telemarketing Consumer Protection Act( TCPA) and the FTC’ s Telemarketing Sales Rule( TSR).
• Many states impose their own – and often stricter – calling restrictions, including permitted call windows, allowable calls per day, and additional consent requirements.
• Outbound teams must also scrub their calling lists against the National Do Not Call( DNC) Registry as well as various state registries.
THE OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES OF OUTBOUND
However, running an outbound contact center comes with several persistent challenges.
1. NUMBER FLAGGING
The first challenge is simply reaching customers in the first place.
Contact rates— the percentage of outgoing calls that lead to a live conversation— can range anywhere from less than 1 % to roughly 15 %, based on our two decades of experience.
Consumers are busy. They are in meetings, commuting, picking up their kids, or otherwise unable to answer the phone( law enforcement really doesn’ t like drivers picking up their phones either).
On top of that, major carriers such as AT & T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have implemented aggressive spam detection systems. Many outbound calls are automatically labeled as“ Spam Likely” or“ Scam Likely.”
While these systems successfully block many fraudulent calls, they also impact legitimate businesses trying to reach their customers. When a call is flagged this way, very few recipients will answer. The result is a dramatically reduced contact rate.
2. IDLE AGENTS
Low contact rates create another operational challenge: idle agents.
Imagine an agent manually dialing phone numbers one at a time. With the very low contact rates noted previously, they spend most of their time listening to ringing tones or voicemail greetings.
Few things destroy productivity faster than agents waiting for calls to connect with a human.
Another complication is phone number reassignment for calls and texts. Over 35 million phone numbers change owners every year, according to FCC data that we’ ve received. The FCC requires organizations to check their lists against the federal reassigned numbers database.
For companies trying to proactively engage customers while remaining compliant, the complexity can be daunting.
4. FRAGMENTED DATA
Finally, many outbound operations suffer from the same problem that has long plagued enterprise CX: fragmented data systems.
Agents often need to navigate multiple applications while speaking with a customer: CRM systems, billing tools, marketing platforms, and internal knowledge bases. In some environments, agents literally work across multiple monitors just to gather the information required for the conversations.
But when agents are focused on navigating systems instead of listening to the customers, the quality of the interaction inevitably suffers.
HOW BEST-IN-CLASS OUTBOUND TEAMS OPERATE
Organizations that run large outbound operations successfully have developed solutions to these challenges.
1. INTELLIGENT NUMBER MANAGEMENT
At first glance, placing outbound calls might seem straightforward: simply dial a number and wait for someone to answer. In practice, it is far more complicated. Carriers rely on constantly evolving algorithms to determine whether numbers should be flagged as spam. These algorithms are essentially black boxes; no one outside the carriers fully understands the exact logic.
To maintain high contact rates, outbound teams must carefully manage large pools of phone numbers across different geographic areas. They must continuously monitor which ones remain“ healthy” and which have been flagged.
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