In 2003, legislation was introduced to limit telemarketer calls, ostensibly to reduce the incessant phone calls people received at all hours of the day. Out of this the do not call registry was born. The National Do Not Call Registry is an opt in list where you register your phone number if you don’t want to receive telemarketing calls, and businesses are required to regularly update their outbound telemarketing campaign phone lists to be current with the DNC list. The legislation limits telemarketing targets (you and me) to only those people that a company had a relationship with. Thus your bank or healthcare professional or school could call you, for example, or those businesses that they had a relationship with, but not any random business, as long as you are on the list. There are lots of exceptions, however. Political campaigns and fundraisers can still call, and companies that you made an inquiry to, with or without you being a customer, but at least the initial legislations it was a start in the right direction.

Personally, while not a big fan of telemarketing calls, I don’t mind them. That is, unless the campaign dialers have bad algorithms and I get dead air with no agent, which is a violation of outbound rules that say there must be a live agent on the line when a person answers. At that point, even me, who has sympathy for the agents, just hang up. The worst of these this year has been an automated greeting that told me to hang on the line for some unknown agent in some unknown company. But I digress.

The problem is that once a perception is born its hard to kill it. Not all outbound calls are bad; in fact some of them are down right valuable. Similarly, not all automated calls are bad either. Sure, I get sick of the campaign calls from Arnie (I live in California), but I certainly like it when my doctor’s office calls with an appointment reminder. Oh, and recently I closed an account and I received an automated call telling me that a refund check was in the mail. Yoo Hoo! I wish that would happen more often.

I recently talked to Premiere Global Services about their success with huge companies in delivering outbound notification solutions, using their Notifications and Reminders Suite. Premiere is a 20+ year old company, with 50K customers around the globe. Notifications are just one of their products, but they sell a lot of it, for doing some pretty valuable things for customers. For example, within the healthcare field they use it to engage the patient with the process of getting care through appointment reminders, calls to remind a patient what to bring with them for a procedure, follow up care instructions, or medication reminders, to name a few. They also provide recipient selected preferences so that customers can be notified when and by what method they prefer. For example, if it’s urgent, send a text, if it’s during the day call my work phone, etc. They also offer multimodal notifications so clients can chose to also send text or email notifications as well. They do this so well that in April, the American Hospital Association announced an exclusive endorsement of Premiere’s Notification and Reminders solution.

So if you think about it, automated outbound lets you do a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people without incurring the overhead of a whole lot of agents. Can you imagine the number of agents it would take during a power outage to call an entire region to let people know when their power is going to be back on? I wouldn’t want that cost attached to my utility bill.
I also just finished a white paper for Voxify on interactive outbound notification, which is one refined step further in delivering value to customers through outbound calls. With interactive outbound you can target a specific group of customers and call during specific times to reach them to offer them a service or a transaction, rather than just deliver them a message. One of the examples I gave in my paper was using an interactive component to outbound calls reminding passengers of upcoming flights. With interactive, in addition to reminding them of a flight or flight change, you can allow passengers to do all sorts of things, such as check in, give them information about bag restrictions, and offer them an upgrade with accompanying deduction of frequent flier points. Interactive means proactive, and interactive outbound let’s companies provide proactive customer service.

Voxify and Premiere Global are just two of many companies offering a variety of great applications, not just offers for timeshare condos or political messages. I guess the bottom line here is that we really need to find a way to convince the general population that not all outbound is bad. We need a PR campaign for outbound, just not using outbound. New legislation should help limit some of the calling which is dragging down the rest. We will never entirely get rid of annoying calls, but it would be fantastic if people became comfortable again with the old fashioned idea that when they answer the phone there will be value there. It can happen. It’s just going to take a lot of work.