Operating a successful outbound contact center can be challenging, particularly in today’s world when callers often block unknown calls. You can improve your current call center operations, but remember that it is an ongoing process.

Fortunately, you have several helpful tools at your disposal. By implementing certain procedures, you can run a profitable contact center and maintain your business reputation during outbound dialing campaigns.

To up your contact center performance, consider implementing the following steps:

CNAM is your business phone’s caller ID name, the factor call recipients often use when deciding to answer your call or not. Registering your numbers’ CNAM data can provide a variety of benefits, including raising your all-important answer rate. Since this process ties the numbers to your business, it gives legitimacy to your phone numbers and your dialing campaign.

In addition, registration allows most modern phones to display your company name on their caller ID. When consumers see your business name, they are much more likely to answer their phones than when they see “unknown” or a flag.

CNAM registration is a simple process and is essential for the success of your calling campaign.

Since the rollout of STIR/SHAKEN, attestation has become a big factor in outbound dialing. Attestation is the process of checking the authenticity of your call’s origination. This scoring system helps curb the practice of spoofing or disguising the origin of a call.

There are three categories of attestation ratings:

An A rating means that the carrier has verified the calling entity is authorized to use the number that they dialed from. To maintain your company’s reputation, you’ll want to have mostly A ratings, although some Bs are acceptable.

You can help keep your attestation ratings high by using the right dialing architecture. Although least call routing (LCR) may be less expensive than other routing methods, it means that your calls pass through different service carriers. This practice makes verification difficult and can lead to lower attestation scores.

It cannot be stated enough: managing your phone numbers is essential for maximum contact center performance. By carefully managing all of the phone numbers for your campaign, you ensure that they remain free from flags and negative labels. By being diligent with phone number management, you can verify that your calls are showing your caller ID information correctly and that you haven’t received a flag from a carrier or consumer-used app.

Effective phone number management means adhering to the following steps:

When you use a single number to place more than 100 calls a day, you are likely to see that number flagged for suspicious activity. That’s why you need to routinely swap out phone numbers so they do not exceed that total.

Also, when you discover a number has been flagged, remove it from your rotation for a few months. After a period of time, these flags should fall off.

While managing phone numbers is essential, monitoring your numbers is just as important. Mistakes happen and a consumer or carrier could erroneously flag one of your numbers. When you actively monitor your phone numbers, you can quickly catch new flags and take action to correct the designation and/or take the number out of rotation temporarily to protect your company’s reputation. Through active phone number monitoring, you can ensure your agents are consistently dialing from clean numbers.

Be sure to scan your numbers regularly for flags. You can also use BatchDialer’s Advanced plan, which will show you how your numbers appear on consumers’ phones. This tool can help eliminate your concern about carrier fragmentation: having your numbers appear differently on different carriers.

To say that consumers are frustrated with unknown calls, robocalls and spam calls is an understatement. In fact, many consumers will automatically block an unknown or negatively labeled call. If your agents are cutting corners during your calling campaigns, you can easily see a low answer rate and plummeting sales.

To ensure strong contact center performance, make certain your agents abide by ethical dialing practices. When your employees comply with industry standards, your company will maintain a strong business reputation with consumers.

Ethical dialing practices include the following steps:

When your agents are courteous, compliant and working from a good lead list, consumers will be more likely to listen and less likely to block or report your numbers.

Your lead lists are the lifeblood of your dialing strategy. Bad lead lists are the source of many call center performance problems. You need to use lists that contain legitimate, up-to-date leads to abide by both federal compliance and ethical dialing practices.

To do so means you must practice thorough list scrubbing. When working on your lead lists, you should ideally have at least three sources to scrub against:

By ensuring your lists are scrubbed against these sources, you can feel confident you aren’t bothering consumers that have chosen to opt-out of your calls, either through internal processes or through the more formal Do Not Call Registry. This FTC site urges consumers to report your company if they receive calls after listing their number.

Disregarding the list can lead to federal penalties. Of course, pestering consumers after they’ve expressed disinterest not only damages your business reputation but also can ruin your phone number reputation.

Also, old lead lists often contain phone numbers that have been reassigned to new consumers. This problem leads to your agents calling people outside of your target group.

You will improve your contact center performance during outbound campaigns if you abide by these six steps. These strategies are the best way to protect your business reputation while still reaching interested consumers.

Robocalls are not only a scourge for consumers, they have led to hard times for many call centers. Your best defense is to remain vigilant, compliant, and proactive. Ultimately, proper dialing practices can help improve the ecosystem of contact centers.