A core vision of Varolii's founders, veterans of the call center industry, was that timely, proactive outbound communication would prevent customers from making more costly inbound calls to our clients. Ten years later, call deflection remains a key value proposition for our company, justifying the use of Varolii for clients ranging from airlines to retailers. These companies want to avoid taking low value (think "non-sales"), but predictable inbound calls from customers seeking information about an event occurring in the client-customer relationship. An event like a minor flight itinerary change. A delayed product shipment. The timing of a package delivery that requires a signature. Or any of a wide variety of events a business could reasonably expect will cause a customer to call in to ask "what do I need to do", only to find out they do not need to do anything.
But what if, in certain situations, a company wants the customer to call? What if a bank is concerned about a customer who is two payments past due on their credit card account, but always reaches the customer's voice mail when they call? Or a health management company wants to enroll a busy baby boomer in a wellness program, only to have the maid screen the Varolii call? Can Varolii applications be designed to deflect inbound calls in some cases, but attract them in others?
Absolutely!
Here are two examples of clients with divergent desires with regard to inbound calls, highlighting the steps we've taken to either deflect the ones they don't want or attract the ones they do.
Electrical Utility – Call Deflection
Most of our utility industry clients would prefer not to speak with their customers, even if they are past due. This is a common attitude among public utilities that operate with a guaranteed rate of return. These companies are regulated by public utility commissions (PUCs) who demand that in exchange for having a built in profit, the utility must provide certain levels of service to their customer base, including prompt answers to incoming customer calls. The fewer of these calls the utility takes, the easier it is for them to meet the PUC's standards. Besides, they figure that if the customers don't pay, they have the ultimate collection tool – they can cut off the juice and the money will come in. Who needs to talk?
Lucky for Varolii, many utilities have come to realize that they can actually get a few more customers to pay them a few days earlier if they call the customer before they cut off the power. Others have been told by their PUC that they must call before they cut. So we have a market in utilities collections.
But they still don't want the inbound calls. Despite the evidence that outbound calling pays for itself with accelerated cash flow and reduced bad debts, there is a constant internal debate between the customer service contact center and the typically much smaller collection operation over whether or not calling customers outbound about past due bills causes more of them to call back inbound, damaging service levels and causing trouble with the PUC.
Because of this conflict inside their company, one of our utility client’s collections department used Varolii on a limited basis to treat only their highest risk customers so as not to annoy the lower risk customers and cause them to call back. At least that was their strategy until they ran a controlled experiment that proved:
- Calling low risk customers paid for itself by raising payment rates 18% over not calling, and
- Outbound calling did not cause a significant increase in inbound calls. In fact, for every 1000 outbound calls made regarding past due accounts, the utility received only 26 inbound calls from these customers.
As the client's manager of customer analytics put it "if you want a customer to call you, don't call them when they go past due. Instead send them a cutoff notice in the mail – almost 100% of customers who get a mailed cutoff notice call in".
This client has also taken steps in their Varolii application to deflect calls into the contact center. First, Varolii uses our Message Retrieval phone number as the Caller ID on our outbound calls. That way if a customer calls back the number, they hit our system, not the utility's contact center, and as long as we have a retrieval message staged for them, the customer can get the past due notification and self-service. And self-service payment or promise to pay is pretty much all they can do – there is no option to transfer into the contact center, further limiting the number of inbound calls.
Is this strategy customer friendly? Perhaps not, but it is appropriate for the utility industry and combined with the objective findings of this client’s study, serves as a good advice for others who are worried that proactive calling will bury them with inbound calls when we know it will only bury them in cash.
Credit Card Collections – Call Attraction
One of our largest clients is responsible for collecting payments on their bank's huge portfolio of credit card holders. When these accounts go past due, this client turns to Varolii for proactive outreach designed to do two things. First, the bank would like to reach the customer live, and if possible get them to cure their delinquency using one of the self-service response options presented in the Varolii message. But if the customer can't pay, or does not answer, the bank still wants to speak with them, even if that means taking a more expensive inbound call. After all, what's $2.50 in call center costs compared to the risk represented by a $2500 card balance that is aging toward bad debt?
So the bank makes it easy for the customer to speak with a representative. The option of transferring out of the Varolii notification is prominently presented in several places within the script – on authentication failures, on incorrect household and in the main message response options – and as accounts become more seriously past due, the bank promotes this option more aggressively by adding language that assures the customer that the bank's CSR's have helped other customers who find themselves in a similar situation.
Since not all our outbound calls reach the customer, and when they do, not all customers listen to our messages, the bank goes further to promote call backs so they can have a conversation. The Caller ID on our notifications is a toll free number that gets customers right to the front of the clients "customer assistance" ACD queue. And call it they do, even when they don't listen to our message. This toll free number is only used by Varolii, allowing the bank to count the number of inbound calls they get off the Caller ID alone. They have found the number of call backs from the Caller ID is 50% greater than the callbacks they get from our answering machine and third party messages.
Closing Thoughts
Even though both companies use Varolii for collections, these two clients operate in very different industries with very different priorities. The utility has a relatively low bad debt exposure per customer and a lot of leverage at their disposal to compel payment. Their objective is to operate an efficient collections operation that avoids costs and complaints…and inbound calls. The bank has a lot of bad debt risk on each account, and not much they can do to the customer but talk about it…which they would like to do in any and all opportunities. Their objective is to have the most effective collection process, with operational cost control a secondary consideration. Both companies have customized their use of the Varolii platform to optimize their results to achieve these somewhat divergent goals.
Call deflection and call attraction, two very different outcomes with one result – better business performance for our clients.
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