The problem starts when almost no one picks up the phone when your outbound call center team is making calls. Your dialer team turns up the dialer, increasing dials per hour. Your operations team decides to call the same phone numbers multiple times in a day. Your leadership team sees a decreasing contact rate, driven by a low answer rate. Leadership decides to change max attempts to 15, 20 or even more.
Calls marked as Scam Likely or Telemarketer don't get answered
The real problem? Your calls are being marked as "Scam Likely" or "Telemarketer."
In the old days, the previously mentioned solutions worked to drive an increase in contacts per hour. Now these same solutions are actually one of the root causes of the problem.
To be clear, the Wild West of call center dialer management is over. In fact, the Wild West of telecom is also over. It has taken some years to implement, but Stir/Shaken (the acronym for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using Tokens) is now firmly in place. The carrier algorithms are stringent, and they are looking at multiple data points.
Signed Calls by Your Carrier May Not Be Delivered with an A Attestation Token
The outbound leg of the call must be delivered with an attestation level ‘A’ token, which means your telecom provider must have an airtight KYC (Know Your Customer) document in place and that carrier must also have a direct SIP connection to the three major carriers that does not touch any TDM infrastructure along the way. TDM networks and least cost routing engines can turn an A token to a B or a C, which can turn a perfectly lawful call to ‘marked as spam’ or blocked completely. An ‘A’ token gets you a checkmark to a handset upon delivery of a call.
Recycled Caller ID Numbers are Bad
Caller ID reputation must be constantly kept intact. Once a number has been flagged, it must be rested for at least six months. It does you no good to recycle numbers from a carrier sourcing from the same polluted pool every few months. If you are a healthcare provider and the number you are using to dial your patient was used to push an unwanted auto warranty pitch five months ago, you are not getting in contact with that patient. The number is still bad.
Local Presence Caller IDs can help, but...
Local presence is not just to make a consumer more comfortable answering from an area code they live in, the carrier algorithms like to see it. However, it does no good to make a hundred dials an hour even with local presence if the carrier algorithm flags it as atypical behavior. It is best to spread the dials across a larger number of local presence Caller IDs vs just one or two. As a rule of thumb, we recommend one Caller ID in a local area for every 500 contacts in your list. Otherwise, you’re still likely to be flagged and tagged as scam likely or telemarketer.
Wild West Smile and Dial Methods Must Change
Dial behavior in general must change. Dialing technology is fine, it is used to notify parents of school closings, telehealth visits and lead generation from people who willingly go on websites and fill out contact me information about insurance quotes and vacation getaway packages. It’s the wild behavior of high CPS (Calls per Second) and low ALOC (Average Length of Call) that is going to burn your lead lists, and all the telephony protocols mentioned above can’t save you if your ALOC is less than 30 seconds.
If your average call length is that short, what are your employees doing on these calls? That’s barely enough time to introduce yourself and tell a customer why you are calling. If you’re seeing a lot of short calls, it’s time to determine if your agents are doing a good job or if they need retraining.
The name of the game is customer engagement. At Quality Voice and Data we can provide you with the nuts and bolts telephony service from cradle to grave, the data and recommendations you need to maintain your company’s positive reputation with the major wireless carriers. In return, you will see your customer contact rate increase significantly.
Outlaws need not apply.
Brad Mullins is Vice President of Sales for Quality Voice & Data, Inc. Brad’s extensive telecom background includes significant experience with both wholesale telecom and retail telecom, working with major carriers and aggregators for more than ten years. In addition, Brad is an expert in hosted SIP telephony services, cloud based least cost routing (LCR) engines, and Inbound Toll Free LCR’s. Brad works with a talented team of NOC technicians and data analysts to deliver Trusted Call Completion® for QVD’s small, medium and enterprise clients.