Outbound needs to clean up its act

Dave Ogden argues that customer experience needs to be placed at the forefront of the outbound industry.

A survey conducted by Step Change has highlighted payday loan companies as the main culprits, with 26 million adults contacted via unsolicited calls or text messages, and has revealed that 83% of consumers want protection from cold callers.

Such aggressive marketing strategies have an incredibly low success rate, with only 3% of respondents in this survey even tempted by the offer, and such practices risk tarnishing the reputation of the outbound industry as a whole.

Although previously dominated by PPI and accident claims, payday loan companies are now the major culprits for harassing customers with unwanted and unsolicited marketing activities. Unwanted contact, as well as the continuing high levels of abandoned and silent calls, can be attributed to two major causes: the misuse of technology originally designed to negate such practices and increased pressure on contact centre managers to use aggressive – but inefficient – contact strategies.

The customer experience needs to be placed at the forefront of business strategies. Tightened purse strings place huge pressure on contact centre managers and it can be all too easy to take the ‘simple route’, using technologies such as automatic diallers and answer machine detection to play the numbers game, when these should be used to improve the customer’s experience. This only serves to drive away the very people you are trying to forge a relationship with.

While this report highlights the rise of payday loan companies, and the fact that PPI calls are still being made, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that all outbound calls are bad.

The majority of organisations do stick to the rules and do put the customer first, using outbound calls to deliver savings or ensuring that financial difficulties are managed as quickly as possible to prevent further distress.

It’s sad to see that once again the ‘strike-it-rich-quick’ type of organisations are preying on consumers with their dubious marketing methods and creating issues for an industry that’s spent a lot of time, effort and money to clean its image up.

While Ofcom and other industry regulators are responding to this outcry, more needs to be done to ensure that measures introduced are adhered to. Policing best practice is paramount to rebuilding consumer confidence in the outbound industry.

Although the unenviable challenge of maintaining the balance between compliance and contact centre productivity remains, responsible organisations are taking radical steps to develop operations, simultaneously ensuring regulatory compliance and greater efficiency, by expanding their offering to alternative contact channels such as email, instant messaging and, crucially, social media.

Improved targeting of these channels will drive inbound calls, improve success rates and keep customers happy.

With thanks to Dave Ogden, Solutions Consultant at Aspect Software.