Are You Identifying the Right Customers for Your Outbound Call Lists?
Steven Brooks, Chief Commercial Officer of Noetica discusses
Last month, the UK government announced what some consider to be controversial plans to introduce identity cards. Over the years I have been in rooms filled with some of the great minds in the field of identity, and the conversation in almost every instance quickly shifts to the philosophical question – What is an identity? You may think identity is a strange topic to debate in the context of the contact centre world, but understanding ‘who’ someone is sits at the very heart of good customer service, sales and marketing.
Who I am very much depends on the circumstances. Say my name to one person and they might say ‘Steven a Director at Noetica’, in another situation it could be ‘that guitarist’, others could say ‘a Leeds United fan’ or ‘he is my dad!’. The truth is that I identify and can be identified (to a certain extent) as all these things at certain times, but they are not always mutually exclusive.
The supermarkets are excellent at understanding what differentiates and unites their customers. 30 years ago, Tesco introduced the Clubcard with the help of the data science company dunnhumby. Use the card or app when you are shopping on a regular basis and you would be amazed at the level of insight Tesco is able to reveal about you. It is far more than any national identity card ever could, and chances are you are a member of more than one of these loyalty schemes.
The problem for businesses, without the level of data science resources or SQL expertise of a supermarket or other larger enterprise, is the ability to delve into the detail of the data they have. Consequently, many will feel forced to play the numbers game. The issue with this approach is contact centres only have so many minutes of available talk time in any given day, and you want as many interactions as possible to be positive, productive and profitable.
Consequently, a contact centre can find itself reliant on somewhat simplified outbound call lists that major on one specific identifier, such as people who have bought a certain product. It is not quite setting up to fail, but it certainly isn’t optimising for success. The frustration is that for many organisations they have the raw material, but they can’t fully tap into it.
This pain point is something many of the Noetica team have experienced, given so many of us have previously worked in or managed contact centres. Fortunately, we also have some very clever technical people who were tasked with solving this problem and that is exactly what they did.
The result is a patented Visual Data Segmentation tool that unlimits a Campaign Manager’s creativity when creating a call list for a campaign. All they need to do is select the attributes they are interested in, and each will appear in a circle on their screen. Then all they need to do is drag them to create a Venn diagram which will automatically and intuitively highlight the intersections they are interested in, and the list is built and ready for dialling.
It may be as top level as wanting to generate a list of everyone who has taken out a pet insurance policy in the past nine months in Yorkshire. However, it could be more granular, for example, females aged 25-35 in Sheffield who have purchased a pet insurance policy for more than one animal in the past five years and have never made a claim. Using the no-code tool means that if the data is available, it can be put to effective use.
In life we often attempt to make sense of the world around us by labelling things based on a defining characteristic (Brexiter or Remainer for example). However, opinions, situations and circumstances are often far more nuanced and the deeper you can delve, the more enlightening it is and this understanding makes for more engaging and empathetic interactions.
Steven Brooks is Chief Commercial Officer at Noetica.
Noetica provides cost-effective, high-end contact centre productivity software. Its product range has been refined over its 27-year history, consistently remaining at the forefront of innovation in the contact centre technology space. By combining the rich functionality of its comprehensive agent productivity tools (Synthesys™), advanced outbound technology (SmartBound™) and comprehensive voice platform (NVP™), Noetica provides tailored solutions to suit any contact centre across industries.
Noetica has been challenging the traditional telephony model and is demonstrably able to provide PBX-free fully featured call centre telephony. The Noetica Voice Platform (NVP™) delivers the expected functionality – ACD, IVR, voice recording, quality management and billing – without the need for an enterprise PBX. Whether in a private cloud or on-premise, this call centre pure play integrates seamlessly with Noetica`s Synthesys™ to radically cut the cost of delivering inbound, outbound, and blended telephony.
The company has recently launched a Skills & Ability Based Routing Engine (SABRE™) along with two major new ground-breaking technologies for outbound calling: – LPD™: AI-oriented detection of all forms of answering machines or voicemail with high accuracy, no initial pause and 0% ‘false positives’, meaning 0% silent calls. – SNoDrop™: High performance predictive dialler with 0% dropped (abandoned) calls.
