TIPS & RESOURCES

Businesses use answering services to improve the customer experience. So, what is an answering service and how does it work? Read on to find out.

What Is An Outbound Call Center?

Whether you’re trying to maintain relationships with current clients, patients, or customers, or looking to find new ones, an outbound call center can fulfill your business communication needs.

So what is an outbound call center? At its heart, an outbound call center is a group of employees dedicated to making calls, conducting marketing operations, and providing customer support on behalf of your business.

In this guide, we’ll explore the importance of outbound call center services, the purposes they serve, and best practices to look for when working with an outbound call center to help you streamline your business communication and build customer loyalty.

What Do Outbound Call Centers Do?

From a practical perspective, an outbound call center solution ensures that a company or organization functions smoothly from the inside out. Essentially, an outbound call center provides customer service by making outgoing calls to clients, patients, or customers of your business. The role of an outbound call center will greatly depend on the products or services your company provides, as well as your current outbound calling strategy.

For example, if your business is a law firm, an outbound call center agent may follow up with leads to help generate more business. However, if you run an HVAC company, an outbound call center with HVAC answering service may:

Make follow-up calls to inform customers about seasonal deals
Follow up with customers after appointments to gauge customer satisfaction
Compile a record of past services and products the customer already purchased or requested

To accomplish the most during each phone call, a virtual receptionist or call center agent in an outbound call center will first establish why they’re making the outgoing call. Are they calling to get product feedback? Are they reaching out to increase customer conversions? Are they working on analytical reports to help grow your business?

Then, to prepare for a call, virtual receptionists gather information about the current customers or prospective customers on their call lists and begin making outbound calls to those phone numbers. To that end, outbound call centers perform a variety of services, including:

Streamlining business processes
Communicating with customers
Connecting with prospective customers

#1 Streamline Business

An outbound call center streamlines business and helps your operations run without a hitch.

Virtual receptionists who make outbound calls collect information, expand the outreach of a business, and organize aspects of the business, such as appointments. From health care providers to law firms, scheduling, canceling, and rearranging appointments are all necessary to ensure smooth business practices.

An outbound center can also take some tasks off your plate. For example, while a lawyer meets with a client, the outbound call center can schedule their next appointments and answer any client questions that may arise following the meeting. That way, the lawyer and her employees can focus on the task at hand.

Outbound call centers simplify communication and can mitigate workload pile ups during the busiest times of the day, ensuring that, as a business owner, you don’t miss any opportunities to touch base with clients.

#2 Communicate With Clients

Multitasking is often praised as a skill, but taking the time to focus on one task at a time is a key to making clients feel appreciated. While you’re prepping a patient intake form, the intake specialists in the outbound call center will carry out communication with clients that require professionalism and expertise, but not an MD.

Consistent communication with clients can contribute to a great customer experience. Consistency in the customer experience can foster stronger connections to your company and keep your clients coming back. They may even be more likely to refer you through word of mouth.

Typically, an outbound call center will provide two primary client communication services: making sales and appointments. By sending appointment reminders and engaging prospective clients in more in-depth conversations about your services, the call center keeps your business thriving.

Sales

Outbound call centers care about the numbers. They want your company to see an increase in profits. Reaching out to current clients about products and services is a great way to ramp up sales. How do they do that over the phone?

Telesales – Telesales is a service that sells products and services to the customer by telephone. Telesales is more focused on the act of selling, rather than generating interest in the product for the future. Telesales outbound agents strive to make a sale right now.

Conducting regular telesales calls can improve customer numbers while you focus on the essential services that your company provides. In addition to telesales, outbound call centers also schedule appointments with clients.

Appointments

Clients won’t always reach out to schedule appointments. It can also be a great courtesy to reach out and show how invested you are in a client. Outbound calls ensure that clients have many lines of communication with you through:

Appointment setting – Setting appointments is one of the most important uses of outbound calls. Not only does appointment setting ensure that a company has bookings, but it also manages the flow of the company schedule. A smooth-running schedule of appointments also leads to a great customer experience in-person if the customer visits your office for the service.

Scheduling appointments, reminding clients or patients of meetings, and handling rescheduling are all vital services that strengthen the link between you and your client. Then, if you offer an in-person service, you can continue to strengthen the connection between you and your client when you meet. In the meantime, outbound call centers keep the connection going.

#3 Reach Out to Prospective Clients

While outbound calls communicate with current customers and clients, they also seek to expand business by reaching out to prospective customers. Prospects, those who might sign up for a service or buy a product, can be found through target research that identifies consumers’ interests and needs.

To do this, outbound call centers typically use two techniques:

Lead generation – Lead generation is one of the marketing techniques that call centers practice to generate interest in a product or service. An outbound caller can highlight the features of a product or service and educate prospective customers on the service’s benefits for them. Lead generation strives to turn an interested prospect into a buying customer.
Telemarketing – Telemarketing, which is a broader category under the “outbound call” umbrella, is also focused on connecting with prospective customers. Any direct contact with the customer to generate interest in a service or product is telemarketing. The goal is to turn prospective customers into current ones. Perhaps the telemarketer won’t make a sale today, but they’ll hope to soon.

Additional Outbound Call Center Services

Outbound call centers improve customer communications. However, they can also do a lot more, including:

Collect data

An outbound call center that’s focused on data collection and analytics can use those numbers to make their service even more effective for your clients. They can learn about what keeps clients interested in a service and about how often they come back. You can also use this information to improve your own business practices when one-on-one with clients.

Research market trends

Outbound call centers conduct market research. Considering that the market and customers are ever-evolving, taking the temperature affords companies insight into what’s working well and what needs to be improved upon. Market research is any combination of techniques to collect information about clients’ needs and preferences.

Conduct surveys

To gauge customer satisfaction, outbound call centers can also conduct surveys and ask questions to understand what customers love about your services and what they believe could be improved upon to help you perfect your offerings.

Always flexible and adapting, outbound call centers know that the market is always changing. To that end, they are experts at figuring out how to best improve your business practices by closing efficiency gaps.

Close Efficiency Gaps

With the excellent insight that market research provides, a company can make tweaks and changes to close efficiency gaps.

For example, perhaps multiple customers report in their satisfaction survey that their legal documents did not arrive quickly enough in the mail. Given the recurrence of that complaint, the call center can report that information to the law firm they work for. With that information, the law firm can expedite mail if needed in certain situations.

Outbound calls are proactive because they ask customers their thoughts about their customer experience before the customer makes an inbound call to broach an issue. This way, companies can address issues before complaints are made and customer retention drops.

When it comes to customer satisfaction, keeping open lines of communication open is essential.

Outbound Call Center Best Practices

What are outbound call center best practices? Quality outbound call centers are aware of the standards that they must adhere to to provide professional-level customer services and adequate employee treatment set by:

Telephone Consumer Protection Act

Sales callers cannot call before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. For outgoing calls, virtual receptionists should anticipate client questions by preparing a script that offers context right away.

Fair Labor Standards

To keep employees focused and happy, call centers also must follow Fair Labor Standards like paying minimum wage and overtime to their outbound agents.

In addition to following these standards, outbound call centers must also respect customer requests to remove their information from the call list. By respecting customers and employees alike, outbound call centers stay true to their purpose of reaching out to strengthen connections and form new ones.

If you are interested in learning more about this type of service or how to start a call center, check out our different guides where we break down the differences between inbound vs outbound calls.

Enlist an Outbound Call Centers with Nexa

What does an outbound call center mean for your business? An outbound call center can streamline your business practices, close efficiency gaps, and cultivate trusted relationships with your company’s customers, clients, or patients.

If you’re looking for a professional service to elevate your business, look no further than Nexa. We provide 24/7 omnichannel services to help improve your customers’ experiences, expand your offerings, and increase your sales and bookings.

Plus, we’ll keep you updated every step of the way so you never miss a beat. When you’re busy with the most important parts of your job, we’ll be busy scheduling appointments and expanding your customer base to make sure everything is running smoothly.