by Glen Taylor
[frame src=”https://www.interactivenw.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Outbound-Icon.jpg” link=”” target=”_self” width=”” height=”” alt=”Outbound Strategy” title=”” align=”right” prettyphoto=”false”]In an earlier article, 5 Steps to an Effective Outbound Strategy, we presented best practices for developing an effective outreach solution and the value that businesses derive from proactive customer engagement. In this article, we’d like to introduce Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager (POM), a very powerful and effective tool for enabling proactive customer engagement on the Avaya Aura® Experience Portal (AAEP) platform. Although AAEP is predominantly used as an inbound platform, when extended with POM functionality, AAEP transforms into a multifunctional inbound and outbound platform capable of delivering a comprehensive set of customer engagement capabilities.
Here we will explore, at a high level, the primary capabilities that POM brings to the Avaya Aura® Experience Portal and your enterprise level organization.
Automated outreach
At its most fundamental level, POM is able to deliver one-way automated messaging, designed simply to convey a bit of useful information. By way of example, this may take the form of a phone call from your dentist reminding you of an upcoming appointment, or a text message or email from your credit card company alerting you of a suspicious transaction.
Self-service assisted outreach
But POM is capable of delivering so much more. Because POM overlays a complete interactive self-service platform, the reminder from your dentist can request that you confirm that you’ve received and understood the message with the touch of a key or even a spoken response. The message from your credit card company can request a confirmation that you made the purchase in question before the transaction is authorized, potentially preventing a fraudulent charge. This ability to enable real time feedback from the recipient has significant value for both the business and the consumer alike.
Agent assisted outreach
In addition to simply collecting a response to a notification, POM can add further value by connecting you to an agent when appropriate. In the case of the dental appointment reminder, if you indicate that you are unable to make your appointment, the application can be enabled to transfer you to a representative to reschedule your appointment, eliminating the need for you to contact your dentist separately. Similarly, if you indicate that you did not make a purchase, your credit card company can enable POM to schedule a customer service agent to call you to initiate replacement of the compromised card with minimal inconvenience to you.
Inbound/outbound blending
Campaigns sent out by enterprise level organizations will likely generate a significant number of transfers to inbound agents. Frequently, these agents are already taking calls from clients. Let’s say, continuing our earlier example, your dentist is part of network that has a contact center dedicated to scheduling appointments. Although it is imperative that the appointment reminders be delivered in a timely fashion, it is important that the outbound campaign doesn’t overload the agent pool during the busiest hours of the day. An outbound POM campaign can be enabled to monitor and adjust to the inbound agent queue. When the call volume rises to a predefined threshold, POM will automatically slow the pace of the appointment reminders. When agents are less busy, POM will automatically resume outbound calls at a faster pace. This increases contact center efficiency while virtually eliminating long hold times for clients.
Agent based outreach
If an organization has agents making manual calls to customers or clients, there is one more way that POM can enhance the outbound strategy and deliver measurable value.
Agent initiated calls can be among the most inefficient. Agents must wade through cumbersome lists, often cherry-picking or inadvertently skipping contacts. If lucky, agents only lose time as the numbers are dialed before being answered; too often, they wait, completely unproductive, as they deal with answering machines, busy signals, and calls that go unanswered.
POM eliminates all of that by automating the entire dialing process with either preview or predictive dialing. Preview dialing enables agents to review information about the client before the call is placed. In this mode, the agent can either be allowed to review the contact record indefinitely, before instructing the POM dialer to initiate the call, or POM can be configured to allow a fixed amount of time before automatically placing the call. Regardless of the method, POM provides reports that can help the contact center administrator understand how effectively agents are progressing through the contact list.
When contact record review is not required, POM has sophisticated algorithms for predictive dialing. This highly effective outbound calling method provides the optimum use of agent time by only presenting calls to an agent when a person has answered the phone. All of the time spent dialing, monitoring busy signals, dealing with unanswered calls, and addressing answering machines is handled within the IVR platform. POM utilizes the same algorithms that have made the Avaya Proactive Contact System (Avaya’s “hard dialer”) an industry leader with its proven speed and efficiency for connecting an agent as soon as the person answers.
Regardless of your organization’s proactive outreach need, Avaya POM has features that will enable you to deliver measurable value to your business and enhanced service to your clients. It may be as simple as one-way notification via a voice call, text message, or email. It may involve agents interacting with a large number of contacts through predictive dialing, or anything in between. INI is able to deliver all of these POM solutions to enterprise level organizations. Schedule a consultation with one of our specialists who can assist in determining the POM solution that is right for your business, and begin the process of enhancing your valuable client relationships.
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