Strategic campaigns for customer care, sales, and marketing are necessary to yield expected or better than expected results. Data driven strategies are always a powerful way to drive any business campaign. Therefore, companies have started focusing more on research and surveys. Certainly, research and surveys are the most reliable methods to identify the basic details of a group of people. As a result, more data-specific campaigns are designed to improve results. An outbound call center software solution is a powerful tool to run any outbound campaign. Definitely, it is outstanding to conduct research. Moreover, it can streamline the process of conducting a survey on a group of people.
In this blog post, we will talk in more detail about using an outbound call center solution to conduct research and survey campaigns. Moreover, we will help you derive the best practices to make the whole process seamless and more fruitful.
We are excited to share insightful details on this subject matter to help you make the best out of your resources. So, without any further ado, let’s jump into details.
1. Understanding Outbound Call Centers
As the name suggests, outbound calls mean outgoing calls that are made by an organization to a customer, prospect, or target audience. Undoubtedly, outbound calling is vital for all organizations. It gives an opportunity to stay connected with customers. Moreover, it helps in locking more deals. Furthermore, it helps in increasing sales, revenue, customer loyalty, and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Certainly, outbound campaigns are beneficial for businesses. However, businesses often lack the required tools and manpower to run outgoing campaigns. Therefore, they take the help of outbound call centers. These call centers run outgoing campaigns for customers to achieve different goals. For example, sales, research, surveys, lead generation, and more.
2. Understanding an Outbound Call Center System
Modern day solutions are more tailored and exclusive to provide a feature rich tool to a business. Moreover, these tools empower user companies with advanced features at a low cost. This creates a win-win situation for a business.
An outbound contact center solution is a tailored tool developed for outbound call centers. It helps streamline outgoing processes with its powerful features like auto dialers, manual dialer, unified view, real time call monitoring, call management features, survey module, reports, and more. Furthermore, these solutions are highly customizable. Therefore, outbound call centers or any business interested in using these solutions can make the required customization and personalization of these solutions.
3. Role of Research and Surveys in a Business
People often use research and surveys as synonyms. However, both of them have different meanings. Moreover, the operational procedure is quite different. So, let’s first understand their meanings in brief.
Understanding Research
Research is a process of identifying certain patterns, trends, behaviors, etc. in a targeted group of people. A business can do research on known or unknown people. Moreover, in research, agents don’t ask direct questions. Generally, there are conversations going on in general to identify certain details. Moreover, research can also be anonymous and may not involve people directly. Using reports, other similar businesses, online trend details, and more research materials, businesses can carry out research. Customers or people involved in research might not know that they are part of the research.
Understanding Survey
The survey is pretty straightforward. Moreover, it is also focused on a target group of people. Agents run an outbound campaign and ask them a set of questions. Moreover, they make entries in the outbound call center software for all received answers for each question. In addition to that, research is always direct and cannot run anonymously because customers need to be informed about the agenda of the call.
Read also:- Outbound Call Center Software: Features, Benefits, and More
Importance of Research and Surveys
Businesses are more conscious about their investment. Certainly, they are aware of crucial decisions they need to make and need concrete data. Therefore, businesses invest in running research and conducting surveys.
Results derived from surveys and research help businesses in multiple ways:
- It shows common issues in the existing system, product, or procedure.
- It shows the effectiveness of different business campaigns. For example, the difference made by a new feature is announced.
- It shows gaps in the missing products.
- It shows effective ways to win clients and prospective clients.
- It defines an efficient approach to keep customers happy and loyal.
- And many more
In conclusion, surveys and research results help businesses to design more result oriented campaigns. For example, they can judge how powerful their current customer care team and tools are. Moreover, they can also learn about the changes expected by clients to improve customer care efforts and tools. As a result, decision makers decide on more specific and result-oriented campaigns, training sessions, software upgrades, and more. A little investment in initial research and ongoing surveys helps to sharpen the axe. As a result, the tree is cut in little time.
4. A Guide to Running an Effective Research and Survey Campaign
There are multiple ways to run a survey or research campaign. You can use your existing team or outbound call center. Moreover, you must use an outbound dialer software solution to improve results. Let us share a guide that can help you run your research and survey campaigns effectively.
Define Agenda
As discussed earlier, research and surveys can have different agendas to achieve. For example, you want to improve sales campaigns. Moreover, you want to increase customer satisfaction with better customer service. Alternatively, you want to develop new features in an existing product, and you want to learn customers’ take on that. In short, there are so many things to run research and surveys. Therefore, you must go one thing at a time. Certainly, you must define the agenda before making any further moves. As a result, the following steps will become quite easier and faster.
Define Target Audience
Once you have defined the agenda, the next move is to decide the target audience. An easier option is to carry out a survey or research campaign on an existing database. However, this is not the most effective option for sure. The best approach is to use a diverse database. Moreover, invest in going out and asking someone who doesn’t know your business and doesn’t use your services. As a result, you will get unbiased and diverse data.
Decide Channel
Nowadays, surveys are conducted across multiple channels. For example, voice call, WhatsApp, email, SMS, and more. Moreover, call center solutions also support different communication channels. As a result, you can run research and survey campaigns using these solutions. Your script and other decisions are dependent on the communication channels. Furthermore, you can run surveys across multiple channels, too. However, making decisions in advance is always helpful in taking the required steps. Therefore, you must decide the channels through which you want to reach your target audiences.
Create an Effective Script
Once the target audience and channel are decided, this is the time to write a script. As explained earlier, in research campaigns, the approach is different from surveys. However, in both cases, you are collecting information from customers. Therefore, it is necessary to work on precise questions. Moreover, you will also need to ensure that you are not repeating the same questions. Furthermore, your questions have to be direct, and the script must be generous. As a result, your target audience will feel more comfortable. Finally, keep your questionnaire short, so that your target audience doesn’t feel overwhelmed.
Train Agents
Generally, call centers have a team of skilled agents. Moreover, asking questions is an easy job, right?
Not really.
Winning the confidence of customers and encouraging them to share honest details is quite challenging. Mostly, people feel shy or unworthy to share what they feel. Therefore, it needs proper training to get information from clients. Moreover, agents need to be conscious of the whole process to make sure they derive useful data rather than garbage. Therefore, effective and ongoing training becomes necessary.
Use the Best Tools
Undoubtedly, you must use the best tools because they will automate processes. Moreover, it will make things more streamlined and reliable. The first tool to have in your infrastructure is an outbound call center solution. Moreover, you should integrate a CRM system with this software. As a result, your agents will have clear data in front of their systems. So, they will not need to ask the same questions repetitively. Moreover, you can invest in the Survey module, which is available as an advanced feature.
The survey module will have a questionnaire on the screen of agents. As a result, agents can quickly ask questions and fill in answers. Moreover, the system will collect all answers and show them as reports. Furthermore, these results are also available as real time data for KPIs on dashboards.
In conclusion, there are multiple technical tools that you can use to make whole campaigns quick and effective.
Be Mindful of Time Investment
This is the most important thing to keep in mind. Some customers might not have time. Therefore, agents should not insist they take surveys. On the other hand, some might have a lot of time as they are talkative. As a result, they can slow down the whole process. Thus, your agents must have the skills to move forward without disrespecting the client. In short, focusing on the time investment of clients and agents is necessary. Therefore, agents and supervisors need to be mindful of time investment on each call and overall.
Use Tools for Graphical Report Generation
Generally, call center solutions provide standard reports in tabular form. These reports are easy to understand. Moreover, these reports also show the values of major KPIs. However, graphical reports are more effective and easier to comprehend. Furthermore, these reports are easy to represent to the team to show major focus areas or highlight results. In addition to that, these reports would take a little time to understand, unlike tabular reports. In short, there are several benefits of using graphical reports. Therefore, if your outbound dialer software does not have graphical reports, it is worth investing in developing graphical reports.
Review Analytics
Analysis of collected data and analytics is necessary because that is what you are expecting to make decisions. However, common practice is to review reports at the end of the campaign. But, if you review analytics, you can make adjustments to the questionnaire or technique of survey and research campaigns. As a result, you can keep improving your technique to enhance results.
Give Control to Agents
Survey and feedback campaigns are more dynamic than ordinary campaigns. Depending on the type of client, they must change the way of asking a question. However, for this, they need to have complete control over the process and flexibility to make quick changes in the process.
5. Conclusion
In conclusion, surveys and research are necessary to design data-driven campaigns. Therefore, all businesses must invest in running surveys and research campaigns. Outbound call centers have the skills, tools, and other resources to run these types of campaigns. However, it is not necessary to use the services of outbound call centers. Certainly, any business with the right team, strategy, and outbound contact center solution can run outgoing campaigns of surveys and research.
You can follow the tips and guides shared in this blog post to run your research and survey campaigns. Moreover, if you are using a service from an outbound call center, then also you can take the lead to drive your campaigns. As a result, you will be able to derive better results with minimum resources.
If you are looking for an outbound solution with custom features, a survey module, and similar advanced functionalities, then we are here to help. Moreover, we provide customization to build a personalized solution for your business. To learn more about this outbound call center software and to book its free trial, contact us.
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