A portable phone, a list of phone numbers, and a simple task—call these numbers, offer this product—might have sufficed to equip outbound contact center agents in the past. While you might get a few leads or sales from that technique, it will take a lot of time and resources, and the ROI will not be what you were hoping for. And while it may be reason enough for some businesses to stop offering their outbound services, the issue is in the process, not the outbound component.
You need to know how to optimize workflows, work within the existing economy and labor market, and utilize current and emerging technology for customer satisfaction to provide efficient outbound services through an outsourcing call center. And for that it is important to know the outbound call center trends in 2023. In this blog, we will have a look at top outbound call center trends in 2023 and beyond:
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and Automation
You have heard about the sudden boom in AI (artificial intelligence) technology, automation potential, ChatGPT, and other innovations. All of this is anticipated to become a significant trend for call centers in 2023 and beyond, both inbound and outbound. Like how a competent CRM system or automated dialing is anticipated now, conversational AI will soon be a standard component of call center technology as it becomes more sophisticated. Of course, compared to earlier technologies like automated dialers or sophisticated IVR systems, AI has many more applications.
For example, AI can help call centers through:
- Automated data analysis
- Creating/servicing self-service solutions
- Interacting with customers directly (i.e., Chatbots)
- Automating workflows such as call logging or data tracking
- Creating FAQs based on knowledge base articles
- Sending/replying to SMS messages
The advantages of outbound call centers with AI implementation are huge. It increases the quality and efficiency of the calls. You can also evaluate the work culture of your operations and improve productivity. It will allow the team to do more work with less effort. Additionally, AI continues to develop and improve and you have to hire a telemarketer who can use the latest technology.
A Focus on Omnichannel Communication and Customer Experience
The omnichannel customer experience is more vital than ever and this is true for both inbound and outbound outsourced telemarketing services. In 2023, the outbound call centers will play more important role than ever, and it will be more reliant on channels other than telephone. Other channels to get more highlighted this year are social media messaging, SMS, text messages, and more. However, when it is about omnichannel trend, there is a key detail that can be overlooked. When many companies think about their omnichannel experience, they think they should be on every channel. That might not be true. Omnichannel is not about adding more channels to the outbound call center strategy. Instead, the core element of omnichannel experience is channel agnostic. This is – the customers receive a delightful experience irrespective of their contact mode.
We all know outbound call centers are for sales support for small businesses. Take an example. If an outbound call center connects with a lead or to-be-customer over phone, then the lead follows up by email, and it always results in in seamless experience for the customers. The responder should be knowledgeable about the phone call from the customer and the background of the customer irrespective of the time the agent is handling the call. A good CRM will help the agents to collect all required information and make it available for all agents.
Of course, to make optimum use of the latest technology, it must be implemented properly to work. Your outsourced telemarketing service provider knows how to leverage CRM solutions, CCaaS platforms and more. With a knowledgeable telemarketing outsourcing partner, you can minimize cost and maximize efficiency.
Personalization and Customer Segmentation
Speaking of data and personalization, emerging trends for 2023 and beyond include consumer segmentation, hyper-targeting, and enhanced customization. Long a trend in inbound customer service, personalization is now spreading to outbound marketing and phoning as well as it can work for sales support for small business. Consider that greater quality leads will come your way if your outbound call center strategies are more tailored to each consumer. With higher quality leads come higher conversion rates, making your outbound call center more effective and efficient overall.
But how are outbound call centers actually implementing this?
One is the expanded data and analytics already discussed. With more data and information about your clients, you can segment them and tailor your communications to them. Take into account, for illustration, an outbound call center that engages in cross- and up-selling. The effectiveness of their selling will be diminished if the call center has little information about their consumers and instead makes a general pitch for an upsell opportunity that may or may not be applicable to the specific person.
A contemporary outbound call center, on the other hand, will be able to observe as they call a customer what the consumer has recently purchased, the customer interactions, communications, and more since they are keeping up with trends and adopting advanced data analytics for customer segmentation. As a result, they can make a tailored recommendation for an upsell when they speak with the consumer that will be highly targeted to their preferences, past purchases, and current needs, considerably increasing conversions.
Of course, that’s just one example; there are countless others. As the outsourced telemarketing business continues to embrace personalization, we anticipate seeing even more advancements and opportunities for optimization in this area. data and can give the agents a smooth omnichannel experience.
Enhanced Data Analytics and Reporting
With every passing day of 2023, it is clear that data usage and analytics is becoming more important for both outbound and inbound call centers. As outbound call centers always need to optimize their performance, enhance data analytics is going to play the key role. Apart from increased amount of available data, there are enhanced platforms and tools that let the organizations to understand and analyze data. For example, modern CRM platforms always give a place for collection and storing user data. It will provide huge amount of customer data besides a platform to interpret and analyze it.
And customers are increasingly likely to provide companies with this data as well:
- 63% of customers have no problems with companies using data for personalization, if they own it and not purchase data.
- Only 12% of customers say they need to share as little data as possible with the brands.
- Companies now manage, on average, three times as much customer data compared to five years ago.
So, what’s happening with all that data in outbound call centers? In 2023, that data needs to drive both personalization and optimization.
Take an example. Count the case of machine learning and predictive analytics for outbound call center optimization.The two data analytics technologies can assist call center forecasting, scheduling, smoother internal operations, maximized agent scheduling and more. With the optimized number of agents scheduled at any given time, you can enhance operational efficiency by decreasing the number of time when you have too many agents scheduling according to the call volume. Additionally, you can also improve the customer-facing results by decreasing the number of times with few agents scheduled given the call volume.
The enhanced data analytics can improve efficacy for both customer-facing and internal metrics. Customer data also helps with improved reporting and KPI tracking for better decision-making. For instance, increased customer data can assist a company understand preferences of individual customers so you can cater customers on a huge scale. The small personalization changes reinforce customer loyalty and satisfaction besides making outbound marketing and sales more effective.
Final Thoughts
Considering the demands of outbound call center, SupportSave offers a range of outbound services for their clients, including telemarketing and sales support for small business. Our experience in the customer communication domain, compliant services and reasonable pricing set us apart from our competition. Get in touch with us for dedicated agents under budget according to your preferred customized package.