The Rise of Customer Initiated Outbound Calling: Steven Brook, Chief Commercial Officer at Noetica discusses the benefits to the contact centre
Imagine having the same level of control over inbound calling as you do with outbound campaigns. No more sweating over the number of calls in the queue, abandon rates, average speed to answer time, or other key performance indicators. What if you could schedule calls initially initiated by the customer, to be more convenient for all concerned?
Now picture the scene. A customer is on your website looking for information but needs help. They see the ‘live’ chat button, click on it, and begin a text conversation with an AI chatbot. Because of the nature of the customer’s enquiry, it becomes clear that human intervention is needed. The customer is notified and automatically placed in an outbound queue, which could either be a continuation of the text chat session, or switch to a voice channel with the agent.
How that queue is managed is predetermined by the contact centre. For example, rules may be set based on the type of enquiry, its urgency, or even the current and potential future value of the customer. It could also be based on agent (and agent skill) availability, or a request from the customer, who has a preferred time.
Technically, it is an inbound interaction as the customer drove it, however the organisation manages it as if it were outbound. The benefit to the customer is that they will be able to talk to someone who will already have all the information they need to resolve their issue, without necessarily waiting in a long queue. Meanwhile, for the contact centre, it can better schedule calls, helping to smooth out peaks and troughs in demand and optimise agent time.
Taking this approach dovetails with other key areas where AI can assist contact centres to deliver better service whilst lowering operating costs. For example, expanding the use of AI chatbots beyond text to voice, and transferring customers from an agent to a bot. In addition to the operational benefits, these tactics can also generate better outcomes, for example where a customer may not feel comfortable discussing health or financial related issues, or an issue can be easily addressed using automation.
Contact centre operations have come a long way since conversations about multi-channel communication began in the mid 1990’s as email, live and assisted chat emerged. Gartner expects chatbots to be the primary customer service channel for as many as 25 percent of organisations by next year. It has also been reported that the analyst group predicts that the EU will mandate the right to speak to a human by 2028.
Chatbot technology has vastly improved and can in some instances be almost indistinguishable from human interaction, the role of the ‘real’ agent remains intrinsic to the sales and service aspects of contact centre operations. In fact, research from Cavell published in June 2025 points to jobs in contact centres being on an upward trajectory, with global agent positions rising from 15.3 million in 2025 to 16.8 million by 2029.
The organisations that succeed will be those able to traverse and blend existing, new, and emerging digital channels with human interaction. Managing inbound using proven outbound campaign management tools and technique has the potential to create a far smarter way of working. It is time to stop thinking in binary terms of inbound and outbound and instead use sophisticated data segmentation and outbound campaign management functionality to make your operation SmartBound.
Steven Brook is Chief Commercial Officer at Noetica
Noetica provides cost-effective, high-end contact centre productivity software. Its product range has been refined over its 30-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.
