Scenario - bxp for Outbound Campaign management

1 Overview

A key part of any form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is staying in touch with your customers. There are numerous methods to be able to get in touch: door to door, phone calls, sms and mms text messages, emails and letters. There are many approaches to be able to do these follow ups. The word campaign is used heavily in this area as a Campaign. A campaign can be defined as "To engage in an operation planned to achieve a certain goal" [1]

By the very definition a campaign usually has a limited time window of operation. It also has a goal and the measurement of this goal will be a measurement of the success of the campaign.

There are many types of campaigns

• Data Cleaning
• Upsell / Cross Sell
• Surveys / Questionnaires
• Business Development
• Sales (Business-2-Business)
• Follow up of Inbound Contact

The primary operational training on this area is available from the Contact Centre training document Contact_Centre_Training CC-2-3 Outbound contact management

2 Considerations

It is important to bear in mind, as a company, just contacting people isn't always allowed. The Commission for Communications Regulation of Ireland (ComReg) http://www.comreg.ie/ set very clear legal rules as to when it is ok and not ok to be contact customers. The Data Protection commissioner http://www.dataprotection.ie spells out what is safe to do and not to do regarding communications.

• Phone Calls http://www.askcomreg.ie/home_phone/How_do_I_prevent_unwanted_calls_from_direct_marketing_companies_-_cold_calls.213.LE.asp
• Emails and SMS http://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Guide-to-dealing-with-Unsolicited-SMS-messages/406.htm
• Post http://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/A_Consumer_Guide_to_Dealing_with_Unsolicited_Direct_Marketin/288.htm
• Door to Door http://www.consumerhelp.ie/door-to-door

3 Planning your campaign

So if you have permission to contact your customers you decide on your method of contact. bxp software (bxp) can make the delivery of your program even easier.

To facilitate understanding an outbound campaign, lets build one.

3.1 The Contact List

This is the first step. A list of people or businesses to contact. Lists can come from a number of sources.

• Existing customers
• Your Outlook Contacts
• You can purchase a list from a list broker such as
  • Data Ireland http://www.dataireland.ie/Services/Pages/Business-Lists.aspx
  • Bill Moss http://www.bill-moss.com/
• Contacts generated from inbound contact

A sample one is available from http://www.allnone.ie/presentations/uk-500.xls and documented on Form_-_Create_from_Excel

3.2 The communications approach

With your list ready to contact you now choose how you are going to get in touch. If you have marketing permissions to group email or SMS bxp can help with that. The most common campaign approach we see is calling the customers.

In your list of data it can be handy to flag if you're going to Email, Phone, SMS or Post out to the customer.

For this example we're going to phone the customers.

3.3 Creating the form

It is really easy to create a form from an Excel spreadsheet or by building it from scratch.

• To create the from an Excel spreadsheet Form_-_Create_from_Excel
• To create the form from scratch Contact_Centre_Training using CC-1-3 Introduction to Blended Form Structure

At this stage we have a form

3.4 Ownership Strategy

How you distribute the records is the next question. There are a number of options available. Form_-_Record_ownership_strategies

The simplest and quickest to set up for Outbound Campaign management is First Come First Served (FCFS)

To set up the work and begin processing the contacts you've loaded, please review Outbound_-_Queue_Management