Call Center: When most people think of outbound, they think of telemarketing, that is, agents calling people up to try to sell them stuff. Lately, we've heard that there's much more potential for outbound, especially in the areas of customer loyalty, service, reminders, and call backs. Is this a real trend? Is there real traction in these uses? Are there other ways to use diales to help your business?

Matt Taylor, Product Manager, Interactive Intelligence: More than 20 years ago dialers began as a tool that enabled industries such as banks and credit/collections agencies to more efficiently contact overdue customers at an extremely low cost. This expanded into the use of dialers for telemarketing purposes, and while telemarketing still exists, the large collections firms continue to represent a major portion of outbound dialer users, but with increasingly proactive and "high touch" applications. For instance, the use of automated notification services is on the rise. Collections firms can use these to remind individuals of payment deadlines, thus increasing collections rates without adding costs.

And collections isn’t the only industry making use of dialers. Insurance and loan vendors are transforming the industry with innovative new processes, such as "just-in-time" leads which is an opt-in outbound dialer application that enables vendors to respond dramatically faster to consumer-generated callback requests from sites such as LendingTree. Speed of response is critical to these vendors given studies that show the first to respond to a consumer wins the business 80 percent or more of the time.

Outbound dialers are also increasingly being used for general relationship management, which can improve customer loyalty and also transform customer service initiatives into new revenue streams through activities such as up-selling and cross-selling. Companies differentiating themselves based on service and account management use outbound dialers for this purpose by periodically scheduling proactive calls to existing accounts to inquire about the need for new products or services, or to follow up on "trouble tickets" or issues. An example of this is an outbound notification to home owners of improved mortgage rates. Other examples include publishing companies that send subscribers automated magazine renewal notices, skincare companies that send automated product re-order reminders, and utility companies that send automated notifications of planned outages.

These proactive uses of outbound dialers can generate additional revenue and eliminate customer issues before they even occur. It can also greatly reduce inbound call volume handled by live agents, thus further reducing costs. With agent costs running anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of total contact center costs, these savings can be significant

Call Center: It's been almost three years since the federal "Do Not Call" legislation. Some say that the list merely weeded out the citizens who were unreceptive to telemarketing pitches anyway. Is telemarketing still viable?

Taylor: Yes. This legislation not only weeded out unreceptive citizens, but also forced bad vendors out of the outbound space, or required that they improve the ways they interacted with citizens by better controlling and targeting communications. So, while the regulation has greatly reduced cold-calling telesales, the overall market has been largely sustained by a focus on proactive customer care and efficiencies derived from blending inbound and outbound traffic to maximize agent utilization.

Looking toward the future, the rise of software-only dialer solutions will help decrease costs, thus further fueling telemarketing. Also driving growth is progress made in the areas of technology reliability and security. Vendors have been forced to actively address these former barriers to market with the proliferation of software applications being deployed across distributed networks, and particularly in the context of legislation such as Sarbanes Oxley and the Patriot Act.

Other measures of telemarketing viability include supply-side shipment estimates. Geographically, while industry analysts predict the outbound dialer market to grow at a steady rate of just over 3 percent worldwide through 2011, many experts forecast much higher growth rates for Asia-Pacific and Latin America due, in large part, to contact center outsourcing.

Finally, verticals such as teleservices, financial services, and telecommunications will remain heavy users of outbound dialing technology, with an increasing uptake by verticals such as healthcare, nonprofit, utility, pharmaceutical, insurance, and retail.

Call Center: What trends do you see in dialing?

Taylor: The over-arching trend today is the more sophisticated use of outbound dialing to meet retention, acquisition, and loyalty strategies. This proactive, targeted, "high-touch" customer care approach not only enhances customer service, it can also increase revenue, minimize inbound call volume spikes, and improve agent utilization. This approach is made possible by important advances in dialer technology, such as the maturation of voice over IP (VoIP), and the ability to blend not just inbound and outbound interactions, but various communications types, such as calls, e-mails, Web chats and SMS text messaging. In addition, the convergence of applications such as automatic call distribution (ACD) and interactive voice response (IVR) with outbound dialing result in even more effective customer care programs.

In light of these many advances in dialer technologies, end-users must educate themselves about the different vendor approaches. For maximum scalability, flexibility and ease-of-use, end-users should look for systems that enable incremental migration to IP, paying special attention to the use of standards-based technologies that support distributed sites and remote agents; software-based systems that provide open interfaces for GUI-based administration, supervision and customization; and systems that come as part of a broader "unified communications" suite, enabling a mix-and-match of applications for the most effective campaigns (for example, an inbound call triggers an automated follow-up outbound call with an IVR front-end that administers a customer satisfaction survey or up-sell opportunity).

So, whether applied to collections, fund-raising, or some other initiative, advances in outbound dialers have ensured a future among companies that choose to adapt and innovate, and to the delight of consumers, it’s helping to once and for all shake the industry association with that annoying telemarketing call that inevitably rings smack in the middle of dinner hour.