Are you looking to increase the productivity of your agents? Using an auto-dialer for your call centre can be a straightforward way to bring about instantaneous results. Here’s how - manually dialling a number takes approximately 10-15 seconds. For someone who makes dozens of calls...
We are a country that loves to speak. Calling someone never goes out of fashion. We love to call our friends and family. And this also applies to brands. We love talking to our service providers, brands, etc. when things go wrong. In a lot of cases, call center campaigns or call campaigns are a lot faster than relying on emails or social media for resolution of issues.
The one complaint that we always hear from customers is that they do not want to talk to a robot aka an IVR system. We agree! No one wants to waste time talking to a bot. The problem that occurs is not the IVR itself but the call flows. They end up being messy and are often not well thought through.
But what if you can use automated call center campaigns to benefit your customers? What if you can use automated IVR calls to run call center campaigns at scale, and service a lot more customers without investing in an expensive call center (people, infrastructure, and the whole nine yards)?
On an aside, if you’re looking for tips on creating an IVR call flow that your customers will actually find useful, head over here. We spoke to some real customers who gave us some specific responses to how they would want their IVR designed.
Coming back to what we were talking about – how can you run an outbound call center campaign that your customers (and, of course, your business) can benefit from? Here are 7 ideas for you:
1. Survey Call Campaigns
This is probably the most common way that outbound call center campaigns are used. An automated call is a simple tool to understand what a large number of people feel about a particular topic.
a. Market research:
One of our customers uses Exotel to run large-scale surveys for market research. What would you currently do if you would like to understand a market or what people think of a particular product? You would probably create a survey on a tool like Survey Monkey and pass the link on to a bunch of people who are relevant and whose feedback you’d like to receive. While this is not a bad way to run a market research campaign, it also severely restricts the people you can get a feedback form. An automated call to do something like this can greatly widen your funnel. And this leads to a better response rate.
b. Verification of research:
Another one of our customers conducts large-scale face-to-face research for FMCG companies. But often, they do not have control over the people their field force interviews. And this can lead to the research data being unreliable. In this case, they use an automated IVR call center campaign to verify the people that the field agents interview. This gives them a better understanding of their respondents and also build their database.
Benefits:
- Call center campaigns have better response rate as compared to emails and survey forms.
- Customizable call flows – you can dynamically change the call flow based on the responses in real-time
- Easily captured responses
- Cost-effective
2. Feedback Call Campaigns
Feedback is crucial to a customer facing team to improve. It is not just about feedback from the customers but it also about the timeliness of the feedback.
a. Tracking the feedback
Through a simple automated outbound IVR call center campaign and a Google spreadsheet integration, you can reach out to all of your customers to collect feedback, collate them and use them to analyze and come up with actionable insights. And this is something a lot of our customers use automated call center campaigns for.
b. Scalable for large projects
The Tirupati Municipal Corporation implemented the smart cities initiative. At the end of the project, they wanted to get feedback from the general public on the success of the initiative. And easiest way to collect this feedback and also stay on top of the responses received was to do an automated call center campaign and collect the data. Even on this scale, they were able to collect feedback from the people in their constituency with minimal manual intervention.
3. First Level of Interview for Job Seekers
One of our clients, Babajob, have found an innovative way to use automated IVR call center campaigns. They have a central virtual number where job seekers can give a missed call to. The job seekers will then receive a call back on the number with a list of questions based on the job they’ve applied for. This forms the first level of filtration.
Every day, we connect tens of thousands of job seekers with potential employers. And Exotel makes this process extremely efficient. If we did not use Exotel, we will need to run 24×7 call centers will 100’s of executives to handle calls at this scale. – Roshan Nair, Product Manager, Babajob.
The responses to the questions are recorded by Babajob and this helps them connect the job seekers to the relevant jobs that make sense for them.
4. Announcement Call Campaigns
There are a few different kinds of announcement campaigns that our clients use us for. Announcements about sales, new product offers, job availability, etc. An automated IVR call center campaign works very well for any kind of mass announcement. And traditionally, we’ve seen it work much better than SMS or email for this kind of promotion.
And this is also a cost-effective way for companies to understand the reach and response of mass announcements like these.
Announcement call center campaigns are widely being adopted by brands and businesses to replace human force and reduce cost.
5. Educational Call Campaigns
Ola uses automated IVR call center campaigns in a very innovative manner to aid their drivers’ education. Any time there is a product update or when a new feature is introduced in the driver facing app, they make a video explaining the updates and push it to the app. At the end of the video, an automated outbound call is made to the driver. On this call, they ask the driver if they have understood the new update/feature. And based on the driver’s response, they put them in touch with a live agent at the end of the automated call using virtual phone numbers.
This is a fantastic way to educate your target audience about your product without investing in people.
6. Campaigning for Polls
Automated IVR calls and call center campaigns are also a very useful tool when it comes to political campaigns. This is a perfect tool for personalization at scale. And these personalized calls can also come with a definite call to action that helps propagate a candidate’s message. This is also an economically feasible tool to reach a large number of people.
7. Reminder Call Campaigns
Everyone can do with a timely reminder of various events in life. What if you can now remind your customers about upcoming payments, events they’ve signed up for, and much more things?
One of our customers uses automated reminder calls to let candidates know about upcoming interviews. A few healthcare startups use automated call center campaigns to remind their customers about upcoming medical appointments as well. Another interesting way to use reminder call center campaigns is to remind customers about their reservations at restaurants. Some of our customers use a mix of calls and SMS to do this. Toit, one of Bangalore’s best-known breweries, sends its customers an SMS with directions to their location after confirming their reservation.
Benefits:
- Positive customer experience
- Cost-effective
- Easy to use set up and get started
Call center campaigns ultimately help brands not just to simply process but to save time and cut costs, in the long run, resulting in a better ROI than any other medium.
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Roman
Thank you, author, for a good article.