v1.0 - Dialler Introduction
Thank you for purchasing the new VoiceFoundry dialler, called “Outbound Contact Manager”(or OCM), which has been designed to meet or exceed all of your outbound customer contact requirements, with full integration between your CRM and Amazon Connect. You are currently reading a comprehensive guide which details dialler functionality, as well as providing useful preparatory and implementation guides for each feature.
This guide will provide all of the information you will need to get your new dialler up and running. We will cover a lot of information in this guide, and it has been split up into lots of sections to cover everything we need to cover.
This guide can be used for initial implementation, or as a documentation reference in case you ever need to refer back to it down the track.
Lets start with a quick introduction to the key concepts of the VoiceFoundry Outbound Contact Manager (OCM).
Key Concepts
In it’s simplest form, a dialler’s main objective is as follows:
Call and manage lists of your customers, at the right times
Track the results of those calls
Detect non connected calls automatically to improve productivity
Automatically schedule callbacks for customers based on those detections
Present these records to your agents, and
Do all of this in a user and data friendly way
Most outbound diallers perform these basic functions, however as businesses grow, and their processes become more complex, it is important to be in possession of a system which can do a lot more. If we use the above key concepts as an example and expand upon them (in red):
Call and manage lists of your customers, at the right times
Where customer management means changing dialling cadence in mid flight
Where callback tracking is important
Where inbound customer return calls affect your outbound dialling
Where flexible dialling time options are required
In a more efficient way than dialling from a list in Excel
Track the results of those calls
In the greatest amount of detail
In a way that can be interpreted by your reporting systems
In a way that your systems can act upon and modify the customer experience
Detect non connected calls automatically to improve productivity
In different dial modes
In a way that can detect answering machines differently to busy tones
Automatically schedule callbacks for customers based on those detections
In a way that is absolutely flexible, and allows great control
In a way that is completely customizable
In a way that provides callback capability based on any call outcome, be it system or agent
Present these records to your agents, and
In a way that makes sense to them
In a way that is customizable and flexible
In a way that is integrated with your existing CRMs and reporting systems
Do all of this in a user and data friendly way
That is integrated via Amazon Connect
How does it work?
OCM is a standalone system, which has the ability to be integrated to (or de-coupled from, if required) your existing CRM and reporting systems. It uses the VoiceFoundry Agent Desktop as a call delivery method to connect calls to agents. It also employs API functionality to allow the administration, management, and reporting capabilities of the dialler to be managed programmatically, reducing the need for manual intervention directly into the dialler system. A high level outline of the dialler process can be described as follows:
Configure the dialler
Setup your record schema - your record schema relates to the fields in the records that you will be uploading to the dialler
Setup your operating times - operating times govern the times and dates that a campaign will dial. You can set operating hours by instance, campaign and customer timezone
Setup your dispositions - your dispositions are selected by agents, and will determine the next action for the record, as well as contributing to reporting and your customer journey
Assign dispositions to groups - disposition groups allow customization of your next record actions, and are assigned to campaigns
Create your campaigns - campaigns are a central meeting place for all of the above settings (ie, operating hours, zonesets, disposition groups, schemas etc). Agents take calls from, and you will upload records to, campaigns. Campaigns also hold your filtering and sorting statements, allow you to configure your agent displays, configure the dial mode, and the configuration of your outbound CLI and maximum attempts
Create your campaign groups - campaign groups are assigned to agents via the VoiceFoundry Agent Desktop Routing Profiles, and allow for the addition of multiple campaigns to agents, along with prioritisation and workload split.
Insert your records
Add records to your campaigns via API, and according to your schema
Dial your records
Start, stop and pause your campaigns to achieve different functionality and flexibility
Send records to your agents for processing
Track your available and active records via the UI
Manage your records
Reset the recall times for records by disposition via the Recycle function
Track your record results
Track the results of your records via automatic data exports from the outbound dialler
Allow the dialler to continue to manage the record, or intervene and change the next action for a record
Update your records
A specialized API allows updating of records in real time for any changes which may be required
Changes could be:
Prohibiting a record from further dialling
Giving the record more dialler attempts after it has completed
Change the record’s journey (switch the record’s campaign)
Preparation
Before starting any dialler implementation it is important to prepare for configuration, and record upload. There are multiple preparatory steps involved, however the most important step is to understand what your business is trying to achieve. Once this is clarified and agreed upon internally, VoiceFoundry can guide you through the preparatory process. At a high level, it is important to:
Understand your required business outcomes
Understand your architecture and the level of integration required
Understanding your record structures
Understand your required dialling outcomes and follow-on actions
Understand the downstream impacts of dialling your customers (ie, Inbound return calls, DNC management, reporting and data warehouse requirements)
Understanding the above will then allow you to determine important factors such as:
Your dialler schema
Your disposition setup
Your operating times
Your reporting data flow
Your agent record distribution
VoiceFoundry will guide you through this process as part of the implementation of OCM.
What’s Next?
Now that we have a good idea on what OCM can do, and we have a good understanding of our requirements, we will continue this guide in the next section, where we will start with a User Interface (UI) tour of OCM.
After the tour, we will move onto the more substantial components, guiding you through the complete configuration of the Dialler Administration Console, and bringing you to the point of configuring and running your own campaigns using OCM.
Strap in!