What Is an Outbound Call Center and What Can One Do?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

An outbound call center is a valuable business tool that can drive your company’s growth and boost the effectiveness of lead generation and customer outreach. To better understand the purpose and function of an outbound call center let’s dive into the various aspects of these operations, such as the services they provide, the regulations they follow, where they’re headed in the future, and how you can best make use of them for your business.

Key Takeaways

• Outbound call center purpose: An outbound call center handles the outgoing calls and communication for a company, making sales, generating leads, conducting market research, and performing general customer outreach.
• Outbound services: Outbound call centers provide many different services, including conducting surveys, generating and qualifying leads, performing sales calls, setting appointments, and soliciting reviews from customers.
• Benefits of outsourcing: A company can benefit in many ways by outsourcing their outbound calls, including 24/7 availability for customers, automating the customer acquisition process, increasing overall customer retention, and allowing their in-house team to put more focus on the core offerings of the business.

The definition of an outbound call center

Outbound call centers specialize in placing outgoing calls to current and prospective customers. Many different organizations make use of outbound call centers to advance their goals, doing so for a variety of reasons. Whether an organization, needs to engage in sales, do market research with surveys, raise funds, or even just follow up with an existing customer, an outbound call center is an extremely valuable asset to have.

What is an outbound call?

When speaking from the perspective of a call center, an outbound call is any call that an agent initiates, calling someone external to the company. The person receiving the call is usually a customer or prospect. An outbound call is the opposite of an “inbound” call, which describes a call that is received by the call center, usually initiated by a current customer or an interested prospect.

What would companies need an outbound call center for?

Growing companies have many reasons to turn to outbound call centers. From generating leads to placing sales, and many other essential business functions, companies use outbound call centers in a variety of ways to strengthen their business and build their customer base.

Customer touchpoint

An outbound call center is a crucial point of contact between an organization and its customers and a chance for two-way communication where the company can provide information to the customer or prospect, and the customer is given a chance to provide feedback or express any concerns.

Conducting market research

Outbound call centers can conduct valuable market research in the form of surveys. These surveys give businesses the data they need to discern the wants, needs, feelings, and buying habits of their customer base, cross-referencing those data points with geographic and demographic information. This data allows companies to make important marketing, sales, and product decisions in a way that best serves their customers.

Generating leads

Outreach is a huge function of outbound call centers. With a team of agents actively contacting potential new customers a company can continuously generate new leads, expanding the number of prospects that can later be converted to paying customers.

Lead qualification

After creating a new lead, an outbound call center agent can make a discovery call to determine whether or not a potential customer is actually a good fit. Not every prospect will want what you have to sell, or even have a legitimate use for it. By qualifying a lead, outbound agents can weed out the leads that are ultimately dead ends, allowing for more focused and fruitful sales efforts.

Making sales calls

With qualified leads in hand, outbound call centers can make sales calls to convert leads into customers and generate revenue that strengthens the bottom line.

Account notifications

To keep customers in the loop, companies will sometimes need to contact existing customers when certain events or issues occur. For instance, a bank calling a customer to notify them of an overdraft, or a retailer calling a customer to inform them that a held item has arrived in the store. This is another excellent service that an outbound call center can provide.

Customer review generation

A large portion of people don’t tend to leave a review about a purchase or experience unless they have strong opinions. Outbound call centers can solicit reviews and feedback from current and former customers, both to gather feedback and to publish in marketing materials.

Setting appointments

Customers and patients don’t always properly mark their calendars with upcoming appointments or even schedule a new appointment in the first place. Outbound call centers can schedule new appointments with customers at regular intervals, and then remind them of upcoming appointments in the days leading up to them.

Federal and state regulations on outbound calls

Unwanted phone calls have become increasingly unwelcome among modern consumers, and in response, the federal government and many state governments have introduced a variety of laws and regulations to ensure that outbound call centers don’t overstep.

In particular, the Do Not Call (DNC) Registry allows people to add their phone number to a national database of numbers that are off-limits to telemarketers. Additionally, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) outlines a series of rules and regulations on the use of certain outbound methods, including pre-recorded messages, the times of day that call centers are allowed to call, and the precise methods of dialing.

Outbound call centers are required to follow these regulations or else face severe fines, so it pays for call centers to be familiar with the DNC, the TCPA, and any other local regulations in the states and countries where they do business.

Outbound vs. inbound call center

Outbound and inbound call centers have many things in common, but they serve different purposes. While outbound call centers are used for the purposes of lead generation, marketing, lead generation, sales, and research, inbound call centers typically handle other functions. Inbound call centers are meant to handle customer service, tech support, inbound sales, and a wide variety of customer inquiries.

Learn more about the difference between inbound and outbound call centers.

Types of outbound calls

Though outbound calls can be further subdivided into various different subtypes, most of them fall under two basic categories: Sales calls and service calls.

• Sales Calls: Outbound call center agents speak to leads and potential customers, with the goal of selling products and services.
• Service Calls: Agents notify current customers about new developments with their accounts, as well as provide helpful information, follow up about previous interactions, or schedule appointments.

Why outsource your outbound calls?

Outsourcing your outbound calls has many benefits for your business, namely:

24/7 availability

An outsourced outbound call center — especially one with locations around the globe — has the capability to perform outbound tasks for your company around the clock, giving you a much wider window of time to generate and nurture promising leads.

Automate customer acquisition

Outbound call centers have access to dedicated technology and software that significantly increase the efficiency of the customer acquisition process. By using tech such as predictive dialers and CRM integrations, many of the more tedious parts of customer acquisition can be streamlined, allowing your outsourced outbound team to create more leads in the same amount of time.

Utilize for customer retention

An outbound call center team can provide a more consistent level of care for your customers and devote more time to ensuring each customer receives adequate attention for their queries.

Reduce time used on calls for in-house staff

A major benefit of outsourcing your calls is that allows your in-house staff to devote more time to your company’s core offerings, putting their all into creating and managing the best products and services, instead of dividing their attention between that and chasing down leads.

Keep up with competitors

At the end of the day, outsourcing can be the edge you need to not only keep pace with the competition but surpass them. With greater efficiency and a higher level of customer experience (CX), outsourcing your outbound call center can level up your business.

The future of outbound call centers

From an increasing presence of automated processes and AI tech to a greater focus on the role of omnichannel communication in a seamless customer experience, to a new emphasis on remote work, recent years have seen an explosion of changes in the ways outbound call centers do business, and changes are expected to continue as time marches forward.

Learn more about the future of outbound call centers.

How to start outsourcing your outbound calls

ROI CX Solutions is a leading provider of outbound call center outsourcing services. We can get you started with customized outbound services, including lead gen, telemarketing, market research, upsell/cross-sell, and much more.

Get your free quote from ROI CX Solutions today and see how your business can take advantage of an outbound call center today!