Outbound Campaigns

Proven Solutions for Outbound Call Challenges

Outbound dialing and call blending are vital to companies that desire outbound dialing capabilities and demand maximum use of contact center resources. Cisco’s suite of outbound calling software solutions coupled with Spanlink’s integration expertise brings contact centers of all shapes and sizes—including single-site, multi-site, single-dialer, multi-dialer, single-product, multi-product, collections and telemarketing— a whole new level of efficiency and profit-focused operational benefits.  

Combining the power of Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Cisco Outbound Option, Spanlink will help you:

  • Design complex contact center outbound campaigns
  • Reduce resource costs and simplify operations
  • Maximize the use of skilled agents' expertise and optimize calling schedules for actual staff resources
  • Maximize dollars collected or sales per agent hour
  • Automate daily, weekly or monthly outbound campaigns that run continuously with minimal effort
  • Use individual dialing modes and deliver rich call-contact information to a best-in-class CTI desktop.

Cisco Outbound Option

Spanlink uses the Cisco Outbound Option dialing platform in four ways for outbound communication:

  1. Predictive: This mode is a dedicated dialing mode that handles contacts by continually adjusting the number of call originations needed per agent to achieve optimal agent usage.
  2. Preview: This mode allows the dialer to first reserve or "lock" an agent by placing a phantom call on the ACD. When reserved, Cisco Outbound Option posts a screen pop to the agent's CTI desktop, allowing the agent to dial, skip, or cancel the request.
  3. Progressive power dialing: This mode allows campaign administrators to configure the dialing rate such that Cisco Outbound Option does not attempt to predict the number of lines needed per agent and instead dials a set number of lines per agent.
  4. Automated outbound messaging: Working with campaign logic specific to the business needs, the dialer list gets called. A unique massage is set up for each campaign, which can be played directly to answering machines. If configured, the customers receiving the call can be connected to agents.  The dialer is integrated with Cisco CVP, an IVR, providing greater flexibility than just traditional messaging. A post call survey, when a customer is called after a service has been completed, is an example of this business practice. Post call surveys help contact centers, and businesses in general, gain insight into agent performance and emergency notifications. 

The Cisco Outbound Option, with its combination of outbound dialing modes, complements the powerful inbound call-handling capabilities of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise platform with a robust outbound call-management solution. In addition to ensuring tight integration within the Cisco contact center platform, Spanlink integrates a variety of third party solutions.

 

When companies try to implement a point solution, they often end up with separate reporting, scheduling and performance management tools. Companies with point dialing solutions often comment that agents have low occupancy rates and call handling performance based upon blind spots during the time they were logged off from the Cisco systems and were working on outbound or email management. The Spanlink-provided Cisco outbound contact center solution allows agents to work in an enterprise skill-group that inherently feeds the enterprise WFM solution with work time and CTI events for call handling. By having the agent work from within the ACD, true performance is tracked and reported upon.

 

Call blending has seamlessly unified third party applications with Cisco Solutions, the Cisco Outbound Option provides one reporting interface to enterprise statistics – saving customers time and money. Spanlink customizes outbound contact center solutions based on the customers’ needs and works with customers to develop a set of business rules that identify when agents will be dialing, receiving calls or responding to email based upon individual queue performance.

 

The ability for agents to handle both inbound and outbound contacts offers a way to optimize contact center resources. The Cisco Outbound Option, coupled with Spanlink’s integration expertise, enables the multi-functional contact center to include outbound campaign solutions that take advantage of the enterprise view that Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise maintains over agent resources.

Supporting Case Studies

Case 1

A global business process outsourcing company that provides a full range of front-to-back office outsourced solutions worked with Spanlink to deploy Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Cisco Outbound Option. The company uses Cisco Outbound Option for a variety of agent campaigns across several of their customers. Projects can range from dozens to thousands of agents across all the dialing modes – Predictive, Preview, Progressive and Automated Attendant.

When searching for a solution, flexibility and the ability to easily customize outbound campaigns was important to them, as they have a broad set of requirements that they must meet for their customers. In addition, because they are managing a number of customer campaigns at any given time, robust reporting was also a necessity.   With the Spanlink-deployed Cisco solution, this outsourcer can manage and easily customize numerous outbound call campaigns. They have a stout reporting solution that allows them to track agent utilization, number of call, number of sales, time agents spend on the phone, and more, for billing purposes. Campaign rules include strict dialing parameters around time of day, number of annual contacts and propensity for purchasing.

Case 2

A large digital satellite television company uses their outbound solution to call and confirm service quality after all of their installations. This high-volume outbound call campaign integrates the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, Cisco Outbound Option, as well as Cisco Voice Portal (CVP), the enterprise reporting systems, and their unique desktop applications.

 Another outbound campaign that Spanlink has helped this satellite provider with is when customers call for customer care. When customers call in, they are offered an opt-in post call survey where they can provide feedback on the specific agent that they worked with, and their performance. These callbacks have been architected to only be provided when certain business conditions are met – for example, depending upon skill groups and number of calls in queue.

With the Spanlink-deployed Cisco solution, this satellite provider can track not only their contact center agent performance and service levels, but also the service levels of the employees/contractors that go to their customer’s sites to install their service.

Case 3

With unemployment on the rise, Spanlink worked with a State’s Department of Labor and Employment and developed an outbound call campaign to notify companies when former employees made unemployment claims against the company. The campaign uses Cisco Outbound Option and IP-IVR. An automated attendant leaves a message for the company, notifying them of the claim, and if it is incorrect , how to contest it.  The dialing rules have to take into account the office hour of these business-to-business calls. 

By automating this process, the department highly reduces resource costs.

Case 4

1-800 CONTACTS, the world’s largest contact lens store, strives to continuously offer its customers with outstanding customer service – so much that it answers 90 percent of its calls within the first 10 seconds or three rings. Approximately 600 contact center agents handle between 40,000 and 45,000 incoming phone calls, 11,000 to 12,000 out­bound calls and 5,000 customer e-mails each week.

Before 1-800 CONTACTS partnered with Spanlink to deploy the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise solution, they were not able to effectively route or prioritize traffic because they didn’t have everything going into a univer­sal queue. E-mail didn’t come into queue - it was a silo. Inbound calls were in their own silo and they placed outbound calls manually. Spanlink and 1-800 CONTACTS worked together to ensure universal call queuing in the new system with set priority levels: inbound calls first, e-mails second and outbound calls third.

By incorporating outbound calls in the universal queue, Spanlink enabled contact center agents to remain on-line, instead of the previous system requiring them to find free time or go “unavailable” while making out­bound service calls to customers. Now, outbound calls can get pushed into the queue, just like an inbound call, making it a more streamlined and seamless process for their contact center agents. The Dialer/CTI integration with IEX WFM allows contact center supervisors to see the amount of time agents spend making outbound calls. Prior to this integration, outbound call reporting wasn't feasible and hours worked appeared to be blind spots or holes in the agents’ schedule.

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Case Studies

Case 1: A global BPO company deployed Cisco UCCE & Cisco Outbound Option for a variety of agent campaigns that can range from dozens to thousands of agents across all the dialing modes.

Case 2: A large digital satellite television company uses their outbound solution to call and confirm service quality after all of their installations.

Case 3: Spanlink worked with a State’s Department of Labor & Employment and developed an outbound call campaign to notify companies when former employees made unemployment claims.

Case 4: 1-800 CONTACTS now answers 90 percent of its calls within the first 10 seconds or three rings. Approximately 600 contact center agents handle between 40,000 and 45,000 incoming phone calls, 11,000-12,000 out­bound calls and 5,000 customer e-mails each week.