voiceREACH voice broadcasting is ideal for automatically notifying your customers of important information such outstanding invoices or accounts, last minute event information, membership reminders and system outages. If these outbound calls are going to result in people wanting to talk to your company, then you need to ensure you pace the delivery of the automated calls according to your ability to handle the inbound call traffic.
Let's take an example of a company wanting to send automated reminder calls to 3,000 of their customers who are overdue on the invoice due date. In order to increase the effectiveness of the campaign, the company gives customers the option to "press 0 to be pay your bill now" resulting in the customer being transferred to talk with a representative of the company in order to pay their invoice.
This is a good result as it will most likely result in a payment or arrangement to pay. However, if the company sends calls to 3,000 customers at one time, they could get far more inbound transfers than they can handle, resulting in unhappy customers because they can't talk to anyone, or are put on hold while they wait.
Further, if the company has the voice broadcast setup to leave messages on answering devices, then they are also going to get a percentage of people "call back" on the number provided, which further increases the inbound call volumes. Therefore, the company needs to work out how many inbound calls and transfers they can handle, and pace the outgoing calls accordingly. Here's an example of how you do this.
Average call time when taking a payment: 2 minutes
Average downtime between calls (to make notes etc.): 1 minute
# of staff available to take inbound calls: 10
Therefore, each staff member can receive a maximum of 20 calls per hour, and with 10 staff, that's a total of 200 inbound calls per hour.
Now they need to calculate what % of outbound calls will result in transfers to the company. This requires a bit of guess work, however we are able to provide assistance through our experience with various companies. Here are some indicative stats on call transfers and call backs.
Total list size: 3,000
Live Answer Stats
Ave % of live answers: 60%
Ave % of live transfers: 20%
Therefore, from live answers, you should expect a total of 360 callers to "press 0 to transfer".
Answering Machines
Ave % of answering machines: 40%
Ave % of call backs: 7%
Therefore, from messages left on answering machines, you should expect a total of 84* call backs.
Using these estimated figures, you can calculate your desired outbound call delivery rate as follows:
Total Inbound Calls: 360 + 84 = 444
Inbound Call Volume Capacity: 200/hour
This means it will take approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes to handle all the inbound calls.
Outbound Pace: 3000 / 135 (mins) = 22.2 calls per minute; or 666 outbound calls per 30 minute block.
Therefore, to keep your inbound call staff working flat out, you should pace your outbound calls at 666 calls per 30 minutes. This should result in the job being finished in a little over 2 hours, and your staff talking to approximately 444 debtors.
*Call backs are normally spread over an extended period of time. However, you need to calculate these rates based on estimates and worst case scenarios.
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