Article

5 Steps to Transform Solicitation Calls

Create customer experiences that retain and generate revenue.

When you hear “outbound calls,” do you, like me, immediately think back to a memory:

– Of a random person interrupting your day to try to sell you a product or service you don’t really need.

– Of poor customer experiences that made you say you would never do business with them.

– Of uncomfortable situations of saying no or hanging up the call…

If this strikes a chord, I’m sure you, like me, will be pleased to learn that the world of outbound calls has evolved. Businesses today are adopting a different approach, and the results are fascinating.

A few companies are ahead of the curve and have decided that the era of solicitation calls to try to acquire new customers through outbound calls is over. Instead, thanks to the development of digital channels, AI tools, and Business Intelligence tools, we can now create targeted, convenient, and impactful campaigns to develop the relationship with our existing customers.

For years, we’ve heard that it’s less costly to retain and develop an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Well, these companies are bringing this concept to life. And the results speak for themselves. What these companies are doing is deeply aligned with their commitment to customer experience, and the consequences are increased revenue, better retention, and greater customer satisfaction.

Let me share with you what they do to up their game in 5 steps that you too can apply to your proactive approach to get ahead.

Step 1 – Leverage an Omnichannel Approach

Although the terminology may vary between call centre “outbound campaigns” and marketing with “marketing automation,” the omnichannel approach falls under a “digital first” strategy. This means a proactive campaign ends in the call centre but starts with coordination with the marketing team on existing digital channels.

Setting up successful proactive approaches begins with an omnichannel mindset. For this to work best, it’s important to:

– Know which customers you want to target

– Determine the information you have and what you don’t

– Set a goal for the campaign that you can track.

– Define which channels will be used for what (and when)

– Assess the performance of each channel

– Optimize the impact of each channel

The goal here is to determine which channels work best for your customers and then use them to their full capabilities. For example: Emails can be a wonderful way to quickly convey information to many people, but it’s important to know how many people will click on the website and convert and how many will call the contact centre to convert. Before setting up an outbound call team, we maximized our channels to get customers to convert themselves or call us.

Even in the context of a digital approach, an incoming call is still a priority that we must respond to. It will be essential to coordinate this initiative within the organization. If marketing, sales, and the CCC are not coordinated, it quickly shows. Calls pile up, and the contact centre will experience high wait times and an increase in abandoned calls.

Knowledge is power. So, you need to review previous conversion rates and plan your strategy over time to ensure all teams involved can give their best.

From there, you can determine:

– The number of emails to send at the same time

– How many of them will naturally convert without further interaction

– The number of incoming calls you will generate

– How and when you should integrate outbound calls (after sending all emails and if they haven’t been opened)

This strategy allows each team to fully play its role and reduces the costs of your campaigns while filling missed opportunities.

Step 2 – Create and Maintain a Unique Contact List

The quality of the list can be a decisive factor in your customers’ and employees’ experience. Nobody likes to call the same person multiple times to talk about an exceptional offer to which they are not entitled or which they have already purchased (…).

Before you can create a list, there are a series of steps to execute:

– Identify the data points you have within your organization

– Determine the customers you are targeting

– Decide who (which team) gathers the data

It’s always helpful to start by establishing a common definition of the nature and meaning of these data points for each concerned team. This will allow each department to understand in the same way, whom we are reaching, where the data comes from, and what it means. If, like many organizations, you still need to extract customer data from multiple systems, these steps will be invaluable. If you’re one of the few lucky ones who have already built their integrated 360° customer view, you’re ahead of the game! Once you have your list of sources, you need to establish your exclusion list.

Here are some ideas of what should be on it:

– Customers who have not approved solicitations

– Customers who are not eligible

– Customers who have already purchased

– Etc.

Once you have your list of sources and your exclusion list, the next step is to ensure you can develop a way to refresh your list every day (at a minimum!), in real time, if your systems allow it. This way, you can be sure that these unpleasant errors don’t prevent your agents from having the high impact you seek with your customers.

Step 3 – Operationalize Your Campaign in the Contact Centre

Once you’ve determined whom you want to talk to, are you ready to start calling? There may still be a few elements to consider if you want to achieve the expected benefits. Those who have gone through this process highlight several key elements that have a positive impact on campaign execution.

Understanding the Technology You Need

Technology can simplify the execution of your campaigns. Integrating technology between departments and channels is the simplest approach, but if you’re not there yet, don’t worry, you can still have successful campaigns. It may just mean that coordination and compilation of the required information take a bit more work.

To execute digital channels, there are some important tools on the marketing side that you’ll want to use to track progress and impact:

In doing so, it’s essential not to rely solely on solution publishers’ web pages or what they tell you:

– Automation capabilities

– Tracking openings

– Conversion rates

If you have a CRM, it can help your teams connect the dots and record the various initiatives. If you don’t have one, you can still adopt this approach. It’s an asset, but not a sine qua non condition.

If you have more than a few hundred customers to contact, it’s worth considering that you don’t want to manually dial these calls. Evaluate the implementation of a dialler to facilitate and optimize your strategy. This technology has evolved, and you can find several different types of campaign approaches that can be regulated with a relatively low investment. Every time I’ve done a ROI, it’s easy to see that it makes sense.

The efficiency gain is staggering, and with the evolution of technology, diallers can be tailored to your business reality and some things (like messages!) can be automated.

Identify the right profile for the job

Not everyone will be comfortable with this type of call, and that’s okay. You’re generally looking for people who:

– Have excellent customer service skills

– Are comfortable engaging in conversation

– Are knowledgeable about your products and genuinely curious about people.

The right person in the role will allow you to find the balance between happy employees and satisfied customers.

Determine what the team needs as support

A high-impact activity that aligns the team, gets quick feedback, and solves problems on the fly is to integrate team meetings for this specific group.

This allows the team to:

– Share adjustment opportunities they’ve identified with their leaders

– Clarify things that aren’t going as planned

– Identify what’s going well and celebrate victories

– Share their challenges with their peers and get advice and tips to help them overcome them

The sense of community that develops is strong, and having a leader dedicated to their support is also an excellent idea. Finally, are your support teams equipped to support these agents? Don’t forget that they need to be included in the process.

Define your conversation approach

Create training that will allow your frontline teams to understand the approach and experience you want them to help your customers live.

This will help them to:

– Understand the goal and expected benefits of the campaign.

– Take ownership of the customer experience they are asked to create

– Demonstrate the behaviours that will bring the expected results

– To manage uncomfortable conversations

Teams that have invested in this approach see a huge return on investment, in the quality of their conversations but also in the satisfaction of their employees in their work. Customers can sense when old-school sales practices are present, and it diminishes trust. It’s a breath of fresh air when we are faced with a different experience.

Step 4 – Actively Manage Change

It goes without saying that one of the biggest changes to manage in this situation is how to integrate your employees into the process. Proactive campaigns are uncomfortable if we are not prepared. Calling someone and feeling like you’re “bothering” them is a concept that needs to be addressed in training. Add to this discomfort the fact that outbound calls are designed, at their core, to reach our customers at the most convenient time for them. The time when most customers are available is often not when most employees like to work. There’s nothing worse than working at night and/or on weekends and doing work that you’re not having an impact on.

Organizations that are ahead are rethinking their way of managing change, and we’re here for that! The best advice at the root of these changes is the notion of co-creation. “Co-create the project with your frontline collaborators” is something I constantly hear. This allows for creating change talents and helping them grapple with the same issues you are. You’d be surprised at the innovative solutions they can come up with!

A group that has put this idea into practice has managed to transfer 70% of its 40-person team, which only worked during the day, to evening teams, with a turnover rate of only 10%. Another group that implemented this change was able to identify that it had enough employees with the right profile to create a pilot team. The team had so much fun and was so successful that they were surprised to see other employees asking to join!

Step 5 – Create Dashboards and Manage Performance

We’ve all heard the saying, “What gets measured, gets done.” Creating dashboards to track performance is a common practice. In a proactive campaign, it also serves to:

– Coordinate activities between the different channels.

– Engage teams and mobilize everyone around common goals

– Identify and promote behaviours that support the goals

– Track performance evolution over time

– Learn what works and what doesn’t

To support this approach, create 3 dashboards:

– Executive level to have an overview of how the campaign contributes to the overall goals of the company.

– A unified operational view to allow contact centre and marketing teams to create a unified view that will help their teams bring the strategy to life.

– Agent view to allow leaders to dive into the lives of their agents and identify coaching opportunities.

Conclusion

When well executed and the customer and their needs remain at the heart of the approach, organizations have a more significant impact on their outcomes. Organizations that experience great success keep these 5 steps in mind:

– Leverage an omnichannel approach to break down silos and organize work.

– Use internal data to make thoughtful choices and ensure quality.

– Align your operations and ensure your teams have what they need to succeed.

– Inspire change and clarify goals.

– Create ways to track performance so that you can leverage data and achieve results.

With these foundations in place, you can prepare to tackle the question innovatively: Can sales and customer service really go hand in hand? Not only do we answer yes, but we can even add that outbound sales are what your customers expect to improve their experience with you and increase the value you bring them – and yes, that equates to greater customer loyalty and more revenue.

By Guillaume Delroeux

Guillaume is president and leader of customer experience practices at Prométhée consultants and helps organizations with customer relationship centres make the most of their technologies to maximize their impact and create legendary customer experiences.