Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash

The pandemic has increased the demand for intelligent and more empathetic interactions between businesses and their customers. It highlighted the need for businesses to create or improve their services to customers, and to support the workforce behind it, the customer agents. In particular, outbound call centres.

An outbound call centre is a business operation that makes outgoing calls to customers and prospects. Their primary objective is to generate new sales and revenue while growing the customer base. For instance, making new business calls, cross-selling or up-selling calls to existing customers, doing proactive customer services calls, and even debt collection calls.

COVID-19 has impacted many outbound call centres. Due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, businesses steered towards outbound calls to drive more sales and revenue. One of the major impacts of the pandemic on the operations of an outbound call centre was the call volume capacity that agents could handle. There were many productivity issues due to environmental changes such as the shift to working from home, and technology constraints taking a toll on the agents.

Source: Pindrop Pulse Flash Report

According to the Pindrop pulse flash report, the overall call volume to the contact centre climbed 300% in just days during the early stages of COVID-19. However, by the later stages, we see enterprise contact centre call volumes jumping over 800% from normal levels.

So the golden question is how do you connect with your customers, and maximise calls, plus drive revenue at the same time?

Define the problem and determine the right goals.

Firstly, establish the right goals within your business and how you assess performance against them. It could vary from revenue-driven goals, conversion goals or even productivity goals. Define your goals and make sure to avoid these pitfalls while you develop them:

• Undefined problems – Identify and analyse the real problems that your goals will be solving, or else it would simply be a list of desirable things you wish to happen.
• Goals without context – Detailed out the “how” in getting where you want to go so that goals are clear and achievable.
• Fluffed up goals – Try not to overcomplex your goals with buzzwords that will confuse your team, instead break it down into simpler terms that can be easily digested.

A good strategy needs to progress. Taking into account actual resources and competencies will help you progress further.

Identify the right technology with the right capabilities.

When it comes to connecting and engaging with customers in this season, you need to find the right technology that can back you up to achieve your goals. Moreover, a solution that satisfies all your outbound call centre requirements and generates maximum efficiencies in your call centre.

In order to expedite the outbound calls, most call centres have been switching from manual diallers to either an on-premise or cloud-based auto dialler software. The auto dialler helps detect disconnected lines, busy tones, answering machines, and voicemails, intelligently. For auto-diallers, there are 3 modes of communication:

• Preview diallers,
• Progressive dialers, and
• Predictive diallers.

Preview diallers will present the agent with information about the person about to be called and requires a response from the agent either to make the call or not to make the call. This allows the agent time to prepare for conversations with the customer. The customer is then automatically called and, if they pick up, is immediately put in touch with the agent.

Progressive diallers will automatically place a call only when the agent is available to handle the call. It removes the wait time between calls and screens out non-productive calls and only connects agents to calls that are picked by the customer.

Predictive diallers use various call metrics or a defined algorithm to generate the right number of calls to dial at the right time to ensure maximum agent utilisation. It predicts the availability of agents to take the next call by determining outbound calling rates as well as the required resources and personnel to handle the calls.

Each dialling mode has its pros and cons. For outbound call centres with more than a thousand calls made per day would usually want to save the time of agents so that they can maximise agent talk-time and productivity. Therefore, having the most productive dialler, the predictive dialler, becomes a necessity. It is a hands-off technology that will shave as much as 30 seconds from the manual dialling of each call. This will definitely help your agents to invest more time in speaking to the customers, as well as seamlessly move between calls effortlessly.

Enter Juris Predator, the perfect one-stop telephony solution.

We live in a world where change is constant and regulations can change easily too. Hence, knowing every single aspect of your call centre and having total control over it, is crucial. Agility is key. The way it works needs to be easily accessible and configurable through a graphical interface, no matter how complex it is.

So, if you are looking for the perfect solution, Juris Predator, allows you to manipulate complex algorithms with just a few clicks of configurations. Easy-peasy! Equipped with powerful diallers, inbound call routing and comprehensive information tracking, Juris Predator turns your computer into a telephone call management system. This will centralise control over all call-related tasks with powerful and intelligent outbound dialling modes – preview, progressive and predictive. You will be able to fully utilise or even switch between the capabilities of all 3 outbound dialling modes. Juris Predator is able to turn your calls to revenues!

Juris Predator, your one-stop telephony solution to faster connection with your customers.

How can Juris Predator help you turn calls to revenues?

1. Modernise call processes and save operational cost

   Modern times require modern solutions to connect to modern customers. Juris Predator modernises your call processes with the latest technology decreasing human error through call automation and customer info preview. Furthermore, it learns the pace of work and the availability of agents and automates the next calls accordingly, enhancing your call control on a single interface efficiently. This can all be done through efficient algorithms, reducing the idle time of outbound agents. It is way more efficient and it even saves operational costs!

   With its omnichannel capabilities for inbound and outbound services, Juris Predator provides you the seamless capability to handle telephony, email, webchat, fax, and SMS interactions automatically. Let Juris Predator help you manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer experience and an employee experience perspective.

2. Assess performance and quality of agents

   If you are looking for a solution where you can assess the performance and quality of your agents, especially while agents are working from home, Juris Predator is bundled with useful and essential reports that help supervisors, team leaders, and managers keep track of call centre daily activities as well as monitor overall health of the operation with full transparency. Besides, Juris Predator has a Quality Management System (QMS) dialler to deliver excellent service! It monitors and records live calls, agent grading/scoring from the calls, searches and playbacks of the recording, as well as a direct interaction between supervisors and agents on call allowing supervisors to eavesdrop or barge-in to agent’s conversations. This can be used to do performance management, forecasting, scheduling, and training management.

3. Measure and monitor goals

   Earlier, we spoke about how you would need to know every single aspect of your call centre and having total control over it. Therefore, having “Superman’s vision” helps. Just like how Clark Kent can see things in clear detail plus planets and space with his naked eye. With Juris Predator’s Supervisor Dashboard, ongoing campaigns and agents performance status can be monitored and tracked in real-time. It also creates unified reports for troubleshooting or inspecting cluster data for you to make informed and better business decisions. For example, daily reports of the call completion results. Every single decision has a cost so making better decisions driven by data is crucial to every business. Delayed statistics can delay your responsiveness.

4. Build meaningful relationships and increase business revenues

   Last but not least, connect with customers! With Juris Predator’s intelligent and powerful auto diallers, the fat has been trimmed, and what’s left are customers with potential. With high-potential-to-convert customers, agents will feel more motivated to engage and convince them. However, customers can smell stilted call centre scripts from a mile away. Therefore, with the increased outbound agents’ talk time with customers, agents are able to personalise their scripts and build meaningful relationships and lasting impressions. This will improve your lead to conversion ratio.

As outbound call centres,  your customer service must take a more proactive approach. You will need to modernise the way you connect with your customers. Your technology must be agile and smart, yet have a human touch of empathy. Take a step back to redefine your goals. How can you use technology as an enabler to boost agents’ productivity? When agents are productive and maximising their calls with customers, you will be able to see its impact from the figures of your revenue.

It’s time to revolutionise how you approach your day-to-day operations. Turn your calls into revenues with us!

About JurisTech

JurisTech (Juris Technologies) is a leading Malaysian-based fintech company, specialising in enterprise-class software solutions for banks, financial institutions, and telecommunications companies in Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and beyond.