Raise Outgoing Customer Communications to a New Level

For many organizations, the effort involved in making reminder and notification calls is enormous. Whether making appointment reminders, snow day alerts, or overdue payment advisories, employees end up spending valuable time performing a task that can be easily automated.

However, automating bulk calling can present a number of challenges for many organizations. The call volume and frequency doesn’t always warrant a call center or even a dedicated employee. Third-party and hosted services can be expensive and present additional management and control issues, acting as a disparate branch of the organization, rather than a fully integrated, quick and responsive service.

The good news is, there is a simple way for organizations to make tens to tens of thousands of individual calls each day— all with real-time reporting, high contact rates and modern, professional service standards. This application provides businesses with a simple, easy-to-use way to automate outbound calling. The application fully integrates into a Unified Communications system, letting organizations create automated calling campaigns, which range from simple announcements to scripted, interactive call flows with personalized content.

Built-in retry logic, extensive results logging, and an open interface allowing connections to back end systems, add up to a powerful application that efficiently puts information right where it needs to be and right when it needs to be there.

One example is that a city sends out water shut off notifications. For Network Administrator and technical leads, the application’s ease of use and accessibility helps the city deliver messages that are clear and easy for its residents to understand. They are seeing immediate cost reductions in monthly fees because they can use available trunk lines to send out messages rather than the dedicated analog lines they were using before, and they’ve been able to free up staff in the utility billing department so they can respond to residents more efficiently. The system is extremely reliable and the Outbound Campaign IVR application provides important insight and reporting tools that help them better respond to our community’s needs. They are already looking at other ways to use this flexible tool for other city departments. A Parks & Recreation department, for example, may leverage it for event notification and sign-ups.

With an Outbound Campaign IVR application, organizations can easily create a wide range of interactions with their clients, including scripts such as:

• You have an appointment on May 12th with Dr. Kelly. Press 1 to confirm or press 2 to be connected to a person to re-schedule.

• Your electric bill is 3 days overdue. Your last payment was made on December 16th in the amount of $176.48. Press 1 to make a payment using our automated system or press 2 to speak to an agent.

• Lakeland High School is closed today, December 15, due to the snow and icy road conditions.

• Thank you for your recent visit to Audi Service Specialists. On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is poor and 5 is excellent, how would you rate your overall satisfaction with your experience?

Users can define the set of phone numbers to be called, and set the application to make these calls in collective groups, eliminating the huge time and costs associated with manual calls. Plus, desktop screen pop capabilities are available for calls transferred back to company personnel, providing valuable context for the staff who answer the call. The end results are more productive employees and vastly improved customer service.