By Joe Outlaw
There are countless stories of how enterprises have reduced their contact center operating costs by improving center and agent utilization with the additions of outbound and blending customer contact applications. There are also many stories of increased agent satisfaction and retention as a result of well-managed outbound campaigns, such as Avaya's Proactive Contact customer, The Altman Group's proxy solicitation service, and Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Dialer customer Health Benefits Direct, an independent health insurance broker.
Healthcare
One of Cisco's outbound contact applications customers, a healthcare insurance provider, has a successful disease management application. The application proactively reaches out to recently diagnosed persons to be sure they follow, or are at least aware of, their healthcare coverage and the protocols to get treatment. By actively treating diabetes, for example, the disease is better managed, progression is slowed and costs of treatment are reduced. The application is also used for early-stage heart disease patients.
Cable
Aspect Software has a cable company customer using its Unified IP contact center suite that has deployed a number of proactive customer contact applications. Among these applications are service appointment reminders, special service request status update notifications, outage notifications with status updates, and completed work order notifications with optional customer feedback surveys.
Utilities
Genesys' customer Tampa Electric serves over 650,000 residential and commercial customers in West Central Florida. They notify customers using a Genesys Voice Portal-based application for scheduled maintenance and emergency outages, such as those caused by hurricanes. They also provide proactive periodic updates of the status of efforts to restore power transmission services.
Gaming
Genesys customer Betfair is a UK-based sports betting company. It uses Genesys's Outbound Voice and Express Mail applications to dramatically increase the effectiveness of its customer outreach program. Having its agents better prepared with customers' betting history and preferences before proactively contacting them has been the key to driving new business growth with these customers.
Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for pro-active customer contact, Part 2 reviewed the leading-edge business uses of pro-active customer contact solutions and services, and Part 3 compared some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions and services on the market.
Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.