S3 Ep. 8 The endless possibilities for outbound engagement

Rian Logan (01:59): 

I’ve been with Genesys for 10 years, but prior to that I’ve worked most of my adult life in outbound contact centers. I spent about nine years with Sally Mae, which did quite a bit of outbound dialing. They were Genesys customer, and that’s how I came here. Prior to that, I ran a company called American Marketing Group. It was all telemarketing, all an outbound contact center.  

All that outbound experience, whether it was sales or collections, had a lot of rules and it’s been an ever-changing landscape with compliance. Technology has changed, compliance has changed. And, obviously, people’s attitudes around answering a phone call has changed.  

Rian Logan (03:47): 

Even the term dialer doesn’t do it justice. We now think of it as proactive outreach. And it’s based on what the customer prefers: text, email, phone call.  

Cloud computing and cloud dialing has changed the game so much, especially for dialers. When I used to do this, we had lists and had to call all those people. In a traditional, premises-based world, you would load up those lists to the dialer, maybe in the middle of the night. It was all a batch process. But everything had to be set and ready; list scrubbing and preparation and prioritization and sorting, and in the morning, you just hit go.  

And I remember those days where we would hit go and the dialer wouldn’t launch. One time I ran down flights of stairs into a basement to see that the basement had flooded. Another time all the servers that were running our Sequel jobs had decided to do Microsoft updates. So, none of our lists got imported.  

Cloud does away with all that. I’m not worried about basements flooding or Microsoft updates happening.  

Rian Logan (06:27): 

It’s not only our dialers and proactive outreach campaign management tools that have changed. It’s also where the information’s coming from.   

Back in the nineties, we were pulling information from AS 400 systems that were just green screen dummy terminals. There was no intelligence in those systems. So, you had to bring it into your dialer and your dialer had to have the ability to sort and prioritize and filter and do all these crazy things to get what you needed. What’s replaced that are the rise of smart CRMs.  

So, if you’re using Salesforce, no one knows better when to call next than Salesforce does, and Salesforce can make that list. In fact, it’s got great AI tools to provide a list, sort it, and say who to call next. It’s ready to be sent to the dialer within Genesys Cloud via API.  

The same is true for Latitude, our own accounts receivable management system that has a list-builder tool. It knows best when to call debtors and can manage linked accounts.  

Rian Logan (09:08): 

Absolutely. If you’re talking about digital, and talking about AI, it can’t just be inbound use cases you’re talking about. Talk to any bank, and they’ll tell you they have just as many, if not more, use cases for outbound notifications. Credit and fraud notifications are examples. That’s going to happen on a campaign dialer.  

Rian Logan (10:13): 

The rules are constantly changing. We’ve probably all heard of the “National Do Not Call Registry,” where you opt out of telemarketing calls. There’s also the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and rules around when you can call people who owe you money. There are also rules around calls to mobile phones in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. All of those have impacted how companies are allowed to do outreach to their customers or debtors or patients. They all have to factor in the way they dial and the times they dial to maintain compliance.  

Rian Logan (11:35): 

The compliance is always on the operator, the user of the technology and their own compliance team, their own legal counsel and what they feel is the most risk averse approach.  

Rian Logan (13:03): 

In the last year there were two really big changes. The first is with STIR/SHAKEN, or the TRACED Act. That’s basically dealing with robocalls to cell phones. Unfortunately, that practice paints a bad picture for legitimate dialing companies, so there’s an effort to tamp down on those robo-dialers.  

They’re asking the carriers to use these STIR/SHAKEN protocols to determine where calls are really coming from. So, if a call says it’s coming from Cincinnati, they can look and trace it back to Nigeria. The carrier at that point can make a decision and block the call as spam or mark it spam likely on the receiver’s cell phone. Now she has a more informed choice of whether to answer that call. Trusted caller ID is something that becomes very important. 

Rian Logan (18:11): 

I often get asked if we have technology that uses AI to determine the best channel to reach a customer. The truth is, there’s no AI that’s going to outperform simply asking, “What channel would you prefer to be reached on?” The point is that customer preference is always going to outdo any guess, I don’t care how good the machine learning algorithm is. I should never be guessing on what channel to reach my customer.  

Also, it’s worth noting that, back to compliance, you have to know what channel a customer has opted into. You can’t send someone emails if they’ve unsubscribed. You can’t send them text messages if they’ve replied with, “Stop.”  

Just ask customers for their preference. And then once you have that, you can engage with them.   

Often, the best time to reach out to customers is when they’re on your website, looking at your product or checking their account balance. And the best way to do that is with predictive engagement. 

Rian Logan (20:15): 

One of the things predictive engagement has always done is help decide how to proactively engage with customers on your website. But one of the choices is to, instead, add this person to a contact list for an outbound campaign and dial or message them later.  

Rian Logan (21;23): 

Trusted caller ID is going to be very important in getting customers to pick up the phone, because it’s going to let people know it’s you versus someone trying to sell, say, an extended car warranty. 

Also, there’s more that we can do with proactive outreach to ensure that we’re honoring our customers’ requests for reaching out to them in their preferred method. It’s becoming easier and easier to orchestrate that.   

As the technology improves, all these things get easier. A dialer from 20 years ago is not going to look anything like the proactive outreach of the future. It’s going to be much more simplified interface — where all the heavy lifting is done under the hood.