Five New Paths to Automated Voice Messaging Success

When someone receives an automated call, the dynamics of reacting to the call completely change. With the prevalence of Caller ID, people immediately know who is calling. If it’s a call with known Caller ID at 9:00 p.m., it could be urgent. If it’s a call without Caller ID at 6:00 p.m., it’s probably not important. Response rates to an automated voice messaging (AVM) campaign depend a lot on this basic human nature to respond to calls.

There are five strategies a contact center that is implementing an automated voice messaging campaign should employ to increase response rates, also known as Right Party Verification (RPV), and simultaneously ensure that contact center agents remain highly productive.

1. Ensure clear, precise and concise voice messages
   Customers are turned off by poor quality. Contact centers must ensure that the voice messages in an automated campaign are clear, concise and relevant to their customers. Voice messages that are personalized to customers get attention. If you want the customer to act, then the call to action should be carefully worded and effectively guided. The contact center should use Caller ID in its campaigns if it wants customers to call back. Customers will do so if they missed the voice message or if the voice message went to their answering machine or voice mail. An alternate strategy to reduce inbound calls generated by callbacks can be to use a different Caller ID in an alert-only campaign that leads the customer to call an automated payment line. This strategy will lead to "agentless" transactions that can further automate and improve contact center productivity.
2. Anticipate inbound calls
   Be prepared. AVM turns outbound calls to warm inbound calls, so expect that customers will choose to call back or speak to an agent. Also, ensure that you have sufficient inbound capacity to support the additional inbound calls. If there are several departments in the contact center and each wants to run an AVM campaign, then they should coordinate this with their internal IT department to apportion the inbound calling capacity. Contact centers that aren’t prepared for an increase in inbound calls will end up with frustrated customers and frazzled agents.
3. Anticipate required staffing
   The anticipation of increased call volumes should be communicated to the contact center manager so she or he can plan for staffing changes. Staffing changes do not necessarily mean hiring more agents; rather it involves effective scheduling to move agents between skill groups to cater to the demand. Scheduling agents may also involve making use of agents in a different contact center location or perhaps utilizing home-based agents to answer these calls.
4. Ensure calling strategy fits with overall contact center business processes
   Remove organizational silos to ensure proper resource allocation and communication. The contact center is part of the business process within a company. As such, the contact center manager has to be consulted regarding any AVM campaign the company runs because of the direct impact on contact center operations. The contact center manager must consider staffing, scheduling, call routing strategies and more to optimize the effectiveness of the AVM campaign and the overall success of the contact center.
5. Provide opt-out and self-service options
   Contact centers should also allow customers to “zero-out” to an agent for assistance or use a self-service option to make a fully automated payment. AVM campaigns with faster methods to reach an agent either through touch tone or speech recognition are extremely user friendly and can eliminate customer frustration. Then again, there are some customers who prefer self-service and may not necessarily want to speak to an agent. Providing “agentless” options is key to driving customer satisfaction in such cases.

Automated voice messaging is an extremely powerful and effective communication tool for rapid customer outreach, and contact centers should consider the above strategies when using AVM. Any contact center manager who is successfully using AVM today will tell you that proactive contact, when done effectively, builds customer trust and loyalty.

Provided by Balaji Sundara, director of Product Management at SoundBite Communications. He can be reached at bsundara@soundBite.com.

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