Optimizing outbound calls

Communications News, April, 1998 by Ron Tenbush

A CTI solution focusing on outbound rather than inbound calls leads to a 35% increase in agent productivity.

Managing sales leads and customer contacts effectively is critical for the companies that turn to Harte-Hanks direct Marketing. We help them through a variety of database and telemarketing services; for instance, conducting inbound and outbound teleservice campaigns for Fortune 1,000 companies.

We have a total of 615 agent seats across five U.S. call centers. Our Austin, Texas, center employs 250 agents evenly split between inbound and outbound, handling up to 150,000 calls a month.

Late last year, we realized that we urgently needed to automate our agent desktops, both inbound and outbound. We were particularly concerned that manual procedures for transitioning from one outbound call to the next were making our agents less productive. Every day without a solution limited our outbound capacity, in turn costing us revenue opportunities that could never be recaptured. Our inbound call process also needed automating.

CTI solutions typically address inbound calling. Our focus on the outbound side required a solution that could be quickly and creatively customized to our unique business processes and workflows.

AnswerSoft was the only software provider we found that offered a standards-based solution built on an automation engine that could readily integrate into our environment. This new type of solution--inter-application automation (IAA)--was easy to tailor to our challenging requirements. A pilot at our Austin center was completed in a week, and fine-tuning and full deployment proceeded flawlessly over the next two weeks.

We saw an immediate 35% leap in agent efficiency and corresponding increase in outbound calling capacity. Because of this and the rapid deployment of the solution, we were able to capture new revenues and gain other competitive business advantages during our seasonal peak in November and December--without out adding agents, which would have eroded profit margins.

We first realized we had a problem in the fourth quarter of 1997 when seasonal demand for outbound services exceeded our projections. Unlike many outsourcing call centers, Harte-Hanks focuses on generating and managing sales leads rather than supporting existing customers. It's a project-oriented, deadline-driven business.

We walk a tightrope: if we lack capacity to handle a given promotional campaign, that particular revenue opportunity is lost forever; if we add too many agents, the excess capital cost and infrastructure support quickly depress profitability.

Historically, in our outbound campaigns, a list of names would appear on the desktop as soon as an agent had completed the previous call. Agents were supposed to immediately select a name and press a hotkey to start dialing. Instead, agents would often pause between calls and even browse the list; some said they were looking for a name that felt "lucky."

These pauses lowered agent productivity and reduced the number of outbound calls they were handling. Further, productivity fluctuations made it harder to gauge the human resources we would need for a given campaign.

We looked at predictive dialing, but determined that this type of solution wouldn't help because many of our projects involve business-to-business promotions. Predictive dialing is most effective when calling a direct line, such as a residential number. Our agents typically call individuals at their office and often must navigate a VRU, speak to a company operator, or talk their way past a "gatekeeper."

We decided preview dialing would make outbound call transitions more efficient. A single name with its associated record is retrieved from the database and automatically displayed on the agent desktop after the previous call is completed. The agent has a certain amount of time to scan the record and invoke dialing via a hotkey. If too much time elapses, dialing is automatically invoked.

For each campaign, we write an application in FoxPro or, more recently, Power Builder with a Sybase back end. The application integrates with our Lucent Definity G3 PBX, TSAPI-based telephony server, agent desktops, the client's ODBC-based database of names and associated information, and the on-screen scripts our agents follow. Our Austin call center uses 30 to 40 of these internally developed applications at any given time.

We faced tough challenges because we combine databases and applications running under MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. Some of our older FoxPro applications, for example, operate in a DOS window supported by Windows 95. AnswerSoft was the only automation vendor we found whose product suite supports all these operating systems and standards.

Even so, when we started customizing our IAA solution, we discovered that a hotkey couldn't be used to invoke an action when the target application was running inside a DOS window. Hotkeys are crucial to our agents' efficiency; so the vendor worked with our team to build and test a way around this limitation.