Introduction

The call center hub is crucial to a business. Whether you’re taking calls or making them, a call center is your first line of defense and the first impression to your customer. 

There are 3 different types of call centers or ways that you can split functions within your call center:

1) An inbound call center primarily handles inbound calls and is reactive because your agents are waiting to receive calls.

2) An outbound call center primarily handles outbound calls and is more proactive where your agents are reaching out to your contacts.

3) Oftentimes, a contact center can be blended where they handle both inbound and outbound calling.

For this article, we’ll focus mainly on outbound call centers and how they can impact and improve your business needs.

Be sure to keep these questions in mind while reading:

• Is your call center focused on lead generation or seeking information?
• Do you have the proper software in place for an outbound call center to be successful?
• How can an outbound call center benefit your business goals?

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What is an outbound call center?

This may seem obvious, but an outbound call center is focused on outward communication and can be a great way to spread awareness of your company and/or product. If you’re in the business of constantly searching for new and prospective people who may be interested in what you have to offer, then an outbound call center is what you would use.

Outbound call centers have agents who reach out to potential customers, new customers, and existing customers. Instead of waiting for clients to reach out; the business contacts first. These call centers are traditionally centered around lead generation and sales calls where agents use the information they gather to qualify leads and turn them into customers.

However, it’s not all about cold calling or sales reps. Outside of sales, other use cases for outbound call centers include research, telemarketing, telesales, appointment setting, healthcare, fundraising, and collections. For example, a company sending out a survey to shoppers to collect market research would be using an outbound call center. Or a polling station reaching out to make sure you’re registered to vote would be using an outbound call center.

It’s a pretty simple process too. Outbound call centers typically use dialing technologies to make the calls on their list. Automating the process with tools allows for efficient and effective calls and boosts productivity for agents. There are many different types of dialers; the main ones being preview, power, and predictive dialers. Dialers typically have automatic scheduling and dialing, the ability to filter out busy signals and voicemails before connecting, and most importantly dialers save idle time so agents can get to the next call faster.

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AutoReach is an outbound dialer that is focused on helping companies drive quality conversions through intelligent contact call center solutions. What does that mean? It means you can build easy-to-manage dynamic call campaigns to connect with the right leads at the right time so your team can save time and do their jobs better. Who doesn’t want a call center software that can take some of the repetitive and tedious legwork out for you so you can spend time working towards exceeding your goals?

There are also integrations within dialers that can work with the CRM software your team may currently have (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.) so it makes it easy to put work within the tools you’re familiar with and designed for your workflows. AutoReach has prebuilt CRM integrations and Open APIs with bi-directional syncing so you can connect your applications and easily pull in records.

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What is the difference between an inbound and outbound contact center?

Inbound call centers are focused on receiving incoming calls or communications from customers and are very solution oriented. With an inbound call center typically, there is a support team that monitors and manages customer calls usually related to issues or feedback, payment, renewals or tech support, etc. For example, when you call a customer support number to ask about a package delivery date or your IT help desk at work to get help with a problem with your computer, the person on the other line is part of an inbound call center and is at the ready to respond. Inbound contact centers are focused on customer retention and customer satisfaction.

Agents at an outbound call center always make the first move and are focused on outreach. The efforts are focused on goals such as getting quality leads, sales calls, and conversion rates. There are times when businesses aren’t able to support having their own call centers, so they hire an outsourced call center or BPO (business processing outsourcing). Agents who work at outsourced call centers can sometimes handle both outbound and inbound calls and are trained and managed externally by a separate organization.

The differences between the two contact centers are simple and lie within the reason/goal for the call and who is making it. However, both types of contact centers should consider customer experience and the way agents interact with prospective or current clients is equally important. Regardless of objectives, the way customers feel after getting off the phone whether they called or not is crucial to business growth and development.

Outbound Call Center Software Features

While the different contact centers deal in different areas of the business their needs are similar. Some companies focus on call center software that has both inbound and outbound capabilities to create hybrid contact centers. In addition to phone calls some of the features of contact center software include:

• SMS messaging
• Email
• Reporting and Dashboard
• Live Chat

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What is lead generation?

As mentioned above, lead generation is mainly tied to outbound contact centers. It’s inclusive of the many different tactics and strategies that businesses utilize to bring in sales. Consider event marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing as just a few of the tactics outbound sales teams are putting their efforts behind.

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What are the key metrics for an outbound call center?

For outbound call center agents these are some of the main KPIs they’re measured on:

• Conversion rate: Proportion of calls to sales.
• Calls per agent: Number of successfully completed calls per agent during a certain time frame
• First call close: Number of sales an agent makes with a single call to a lead
• Average handling time (AHT): the point an agent is connected to a consumer to the point the call ends.

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What are the regulations around outbound calling?

As with any type of company in the business of making phone calls, there are rules to follow.

• There are specifics surrounding compliance with the Federal Trade Commission regulations around The Telephone Consumer Protection Act that can impact your work and how you use your dialer.
• Let’s not forget the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry which is a list of consumers who have requested not to be contacted by telemarketers. AutoReach includes DNC management capabilities that prevent agents from dialing numbers that are stored in the internal AutoReach DNC list.
• There are also restricted calling times to be mindful of which means any outgoing calls to a phone number need to be made between the hours of 8 am and 9 pm. If you’re making calls and a customer picks up you also need to answer within 2 seconds or it’s considered “call abandonment.”

TL:DR- Basically, do your homework so you know the dos and don'ts.

If you’re building an outbound call center or improving your outbound call center services and need to find the right dialer to make it all happen check out AutoReach’s capabilities and schedule a demo.