Toronto, ON, Canada, October 15th, 2007 – Altitude Software, a leading independent contact centre solutions vendor, and ContactBabel, contact center industry analysts, today announced findings on the Outbound and Call Blending activities of US Contact Centers, from the “US Contact Center Operational Review 2007”, based on a study of the performance, operations, technology and HR aspects of 204 Contact Centers.
The research, sponsored by Altitude Software, found that the “Do Not Call Registry” legislation is having a dramatic impact with over 40% of respondents acknowledging a reduction of their outbound calling, with more than half of this number reporting big reductions in outbound activities.
The same report shines a new light on Outbound’s CRM “lost opportunity”, with only 26% of contact centers surveyed engaged in proactive customer service, and a mere 11% actively cross-selling or up-selling to existing customers. Feeding into this state of affairs is a clear “technology gap” in contact centers, with 45% using only basic (or preview) dialers and 55% using predictive and progressive dialers, better suited for legislative compliance and for sensitive “CRM calls”.
“The do not call registry is part of the general social and political drift towards allowing consumers and businesses the right not to be contacted by companies” said Steve Morrell, principal analyst at ContactBabel. “which underlines the extent to which contact centers are failing to make an intelligent use of the available technology to deliver proactive customer service – which can be a strong brand builder as well as an effective call avoidance tactic.”
The Altitude uCI 7.5 suite is designed to help companies reinvent customer service through “proactive customer care”, enabling contact centers to use outbound calling to increase customer goodwill. Businesses can use the contact center to proactively contact affected customers/groups when service disruptions are anticipated. Or they can pursue customer satisfaction follow-up after service fulfillment. This business approach can prevent inbound call peaks, allow for better staffing and resource management, and above all increase customer satisfaction
Altitude Software’s solutions for successful proactive contact include pacing mode modules – Preview; Predictive; Power; and a Call Classifier. The Altitude Unified Dialer’s main function is to both automate and add intelligence to the dialing process as it is one of the most important operations in any outbound contact center. Dialing leverages customer information to determine the best time and the most economic way to make successful contact, taking into consideration available human resources and compliance with applicable legislation. Altitude Software has recently developed an automated process to submit outbound dialing campaign lists running on its Altitude Unified Dialer solutions to PossibleNOW’s consumer data privacy management services.
“It’s not enough to just comply with the letter of the law, you need to mitigate consumer complaints by proactive list management practices,” says Mark Lepko, President, North America, for Altitude Software. “The ability to automate daily outbound campaign analysis will provide added assurances that newly registered consumers to DNC lists will not be generating complaints to federal and state agencies”.
The U.S. Contact Center Operational Review 2007 is divided into seventeen separate sections each detailing a segment of the call center industry including Speech Technology, CRM, Outsourcing, Salaries and Recruitment, and many other HR, technological and business process areas. Each section contains analysis of the survey data and comprehensive statistics. Contact center managers and directors, representing a random sample of the industry, were asked a series of questions between March and May 2007 for this report. Analysis of the data was carried out in May and June 2007. The Outbound and Call Blending chapter is available at http://www.altitude.com/ and http://www.contactbabel.com/.
