We were asked recently for tips on how to set up a good calling campaign in Newfies-Dialer, so after some research with our existing customers, and taking advice from people specialising in building IVR and auto-attendant scripts, here are our top tips for a successful outbound calling campaign.
1. The attention span of a contact when listening to an IVR menu is short, particularly as they have just been interrupted by your phone call, therefore keep the introduction message as simple, brief and clear as possible, with as few options as you can get away with, five is an absolute maximum, and three or less is better.
2. On the subject of attention span, in a long IVR menu, there is a good chance that the contact will have forgotten which number to press by the end of the message. So “To talk to a live agent, press one” is far better than “Press one to talk to a live agent”
3. If no valid input is received, use the TIMEOUT and RETRY settings to play the message again as your contact may not have heard the message correctly first time.
4. Ensure that the customer can move automatically through the IVR if no DTMF is received. It may be that there is a problem receiving DTMF. For instance, use branching to introduce an IVR node that says “We have not received any input from you, we are about to pass your call to a live agent, if you don’t want to speak to our agent, please hang-up now”.
5. Make sure that you don’t harass people; give them the option to add themselves to your DNC (Do Not Call) list. Also make sure that you sanitise your contact list against any external relevant DNC lists, e.g. the TPS (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/) in the UK, and the National Do Not Call Registry (https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov/) in the USA.
6. If using TTS (Text to Speech), then consider using Microsoft Speech (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/) which is supported by Newfies-Dialer, which provides good quality TTS in a range of languages.
7. Make a good first impression and grab your contact’s attention. Use the tag facility with TTS in Newfies-Dialer to address your contact by name and personalise your message.
8. Test the campaign on yourself and your staff before going live and accidentally sending an incorrect or improperly configured campaign to millions of people.
Find out more about Newfies-Dialer in our Documentation/Help section.