Call center regulations have improved the industry and relieved consumer pressure caused by illegitimate calls. Proper dialing hygiene is an essential aspect of outbound dialing campaigns. You must maintain the “cleanliness” of your procedures to boost your business reputation, build customer trust, and improve the dialing ecosystem.
Your business should benefit from increased customer satisfaction and sales by following proper dialing hygiene practices. You can improve your process by taking the following steps.
1. Practice Data Hygiene
You will harm your company if you work with “dirty data,” which includes incomplete, non-compliant, and outdated information. Dirty data leads to customers who are unhappy with inappropriate calls and frustrated agents who waste their time following flawed leads.
Your operation will abide by compliance and ethics standards by working with clean and scrubbed data. Be sure to scrub your lists against the DNC, Reassign Number Database, and internal opt-out lists before having agents dial those numbers. Taking these precautions shows consumers and carriers that your business cares about proper dialing hygiene.
2. Compliance Standards
Following compliance regulations is a must in outbound dialing campaigns. You owe it to your clients and your company to follow the strict letter of the law. Also, the FCC and carriers are currently cracking down on robocalls, working to weed out malicious dialers. Failure to follow the law can lead to steep governmental fines and costly consumer lawsuits.
Following all compliance standards, including industry-specific laws such as HIPAA, will bolster your company’s reputation and increase your contact rate. You cannot afford to be lax with these requirements.
3. Dialer Configuration
Ensuring your dialers are configured to abide by TCPA policies is crucial to maintaining your company’s reputation for fair and legal calling campaigns. Incorrect dialer settings will only frustrate the consumer and negatively impact your sales. Three basic principles should be taken into consideration when configuring your dialers:
Avoid early hangups. You must allow the phone to ring for 15 seconds before hanging up.
Reduce abandoned calls to below 3%. This rule refers to live calls that are disconnected before the call recipient speaks.
Don’t leave live customers in the queue for more than 2 seconds. The customer should not have to wait more than 2 seconds after the call greeting before your agent speaks. If your waiting times are longer, you are dialing too many consumers for your current capability.
4. Agent Ethics
In this age of call-blocking apps, consumers wield great power over your caller ID display. One bad interaction with a consumer can lead them to flag your phone number. The resulting “spam,” “scam,” or other designation will harm your company’s reputation and impact its success.
The solution is to instill proper dialing ethics into your agents. They should adhere to all regulations and be trained to demonstrate empathy to call recipients. The right agent training can prevent many costly issues with your calling campaigns.
5. Work With Trusted Partners
With the implementation of attestation ratings, it is essential to work with partners that are STIR/SHAKEN compliant. Proper authentication allows consumers and carriers to detect robocallers and other scammers. Collaborating with the right partners ensures that analytics engines or carriers will not block your calls for routing through untrusted networks.
The FCC is now moving to remove untrusted networks from the Robocall Mitigation Database. This action would essentially ban them from dialing carriers that are STIR/SHAKEN compliant and result in significant harm to their companies.
6. Phone Number Reputation
Monitoring your phone number reputation helps increase your answer rates and protect your company’s reputation. New smartphones are beginning to display rich call data, which can show enhanced information about your business. More caller information leads to greater consumer trust and increased revenue.
Of course, dialing consumers with phone numbers that are flagged or have been improperly labeled leads to low consumer contact rates. These call recipients may even report your phone number, resulting in more flags and reputational damage.
Remember, monitoring your phone numbers lets you quickly seek redress for incorrect flags or labels. Inaction will only make your dialing situation worse.
7. Redressing Phone Number Flags
Seeking redress is the best action when your phone numbers receive flags. SIP call-blocking notification headers can indicate who is blocking your calls. With that knowledge, you can contact the carriers or analytics engines and take steps to redress these concerns.
Remember, when purchasing new numbers, it is essential to scan them for flags or blocks. Many businesses are seeing newly purchased numbers that already have flags. Before using them in your outbound calling campaigns, you must take care of these issues. Once you redress any flags or blocks on a number, you should retain ownership. That way, you have clean numbers to use in your future business efforts.
Importance of Proper Dialing Hygiene
Dialing hygiene means maintaining government compliance, being vigilant about call monitoring, using appropriate dialer settings, and enacting other industry best practices. Adhering to these standards will protect your company’s reputation by keeping your numbers free of flags and carrier/consumer blocking. You will also cultivate trust among consumers who have long been afraid to answer many of their calls.
Your agents must also embrace ethical practices, something that solid training practices will help ensure. Frequent refresher training will also prevent many agent issues. Vigilant dialing hygiene practices will keep your company on solid ground and relieve consumer worry about calling campaigns.