8 Strategies to Improve Call Answer Rates by 40%

Outbound contact center call answer rates continue to decline, highlighting the fact that current outreach practices aren’t working. Legacy list-based dialers repeatedly target customers segmented by automation, resulting in “block this caller” actions and a 4.8% answer rate.  I have firsthand experience with this: At Angi, where I was running a large contact center, we used legacy CCaaS dialers. We called customers until they blocked us. We lost revenue. 

Businesses have failed to effectively address this critical challenge, but it is one that urgently requires attention. We all know that every prospect or customer who doesn’t answer the phone translates into a lost opportunity. The good news is that 90% of people prefer speaking to a real person on the phone rather than an automated agent! What’s important is how you go about connecting with them. At Regal, we believe in personalized outreach triggered by specific customer behavior during every phase of the buyer journey. This drives 25 percent more revenue than the dialing for dollars approach. 

Improve Call Answer Rates

For starters, if your outbound call strategy does not include using Branded Caller ID, which allows you to display your company name and logo as well as other branding elements on the call recipient’s cell phone, you’re missing an easy way to improve brand recognition, increase customer trust… and reduce the likelihood of calls being ignored or mistaken for spam. Branded, event-driven calls boost answer rates by nearly 40 percent. Learn more about the power of Regal Branded Caller ID and key metrics for optimizing Branded Caller ID performance. 

I also recommend the following steps to improve call answer rates:

• Check your caller ID reputation. Are major carriers flagging or blocking any of your calling numbers? If so, swap these numbers out for new registered local numbers to raise connection rates. 
• Refine your scheduling capabilities. Focus your efforts on times your leads are most likely to answer.
• Track which call lists are delivering the most lead conversions. See what’s working and what’s not to make data-driven decisions.
• Strategically employ omnichannel messaging. Phone calls alone will not significantly drive revenue, and, most importantly…
• Customize contact center engagement strategies. Make outreach personal. Every interaction matters. Segment leads by intent. Interact and follow up with your most viable prospects faster.

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In addition to these recommendations, I’m excited to share some thoughts about evolving AI technology, which is poised to help businesses not only increase answer rates but revolutionize overall outbound contact center operational efficiency. Read on to learn why adopting AI is mandatory for competitive advantage.

At Regal, we are rolling out new AI features designed to help you:

• Personalize connections for more impactful audience engagement
• Use customer data to enhance interactions
• Streamline contact center operations for better efficiency and effectiveness
• Scale and drive revenue

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Let’s dive into how this can work for your business… reaching the right customers, at the right time, in the right channel, with the right conversation.

AI-Augmented Agents   

The ultimate goal of AI in the outbound contact center landscape is customer experiences that mimic those of a small business owner, who reaches out to his customers in ways based on everything he knows about them… at an affordable cost. 

We’re not there yet with AI, but today’s automated virtual agents (bots) are evolving into more sophisticated AI-augmented agents. “Super” agents supported by AI, which can provide 24x7 service not available from traditional human agents, strike a balance between automation and human touch. AI tools help these agents gain deeper insights to better handle customer situations. 

I’ll give you one quick example: A prospective student at one of our higher education customers was trying to sign up for a course online. The frustrated human agent couldn’t understand the student due to his strong accent, but the AI-assisted agent understood every word, stayed calm, and, most importantly, successfully assisted the consumer. It makes sense to use AI to quickly perform knowledge lookups that can help agents provide the problem-solving answers consumers seek. We need to continue to automate relatively straightforward actions that instantly increase customer satisfaction, while escalating more complex scenarios to human agents to ensure positive experiences.

We want to improve the customer experience while cost-effectively managing resources. One way to do this is by optimizing the execution of and collaboration between AI-powered agents and human agents. Think of it this way…. some of us like to occasionally go to a small bookstore to get reading recommendations versus exclusively relying on Amazon to tell us which books we’ll like. Both sources are useful to us. When thinking about AI in the outbound customer center environment, imagine human agents as the small bookstore employees and Amazon bots as the AI agents. Traditional bots alone decrease customer engagement, can lead to customer dissatisfaction, and often translate into lost revenue. 

We’re at the onset of this journey, and it’s compelling. Early adopters of AI in the contact center space are poised for measurable competitive advantage, especially midmarket companies that can gain significant market share over the next few years before larger enterprises join the fray. 

Let’s look at what else we can expect from emergent AI moving forward…

Conversational AI Agents

We’ve discovered that for many use cases, generative AI phone agent models, versus the “super” agents I just described, do not require extensive (and expensive) training or tapping into a knowledge base, which slows response time. We can just feed the AI phone agent the customer-specific information needed to handle a call, including in what order to answer the customer’s questions. This human-sounding voice model takes less than 500 milliseconds to respond compared to the several seconds required by a text agent. These intelligent agents not only feel more human, they have skills we mere mortals don’t possess.

Perception and the Future of AI

Blending Efficiency and Engagement

Many remain skeptical about AI in terms of its ability to authentically personalize customer interactions. To some, it feels like an unempathetic, one-size-fits all kind of robotic approach. But at Regal, we believe that as AI technology matures, it will drive more customized and dynamic customer experiences at scale. Modern AI is designed to swiftly deliver more meaningful engagement, responding to individual customer needs at a fraction of the cost of human agents. While AI cannot perfectly handle every situation, it affirms a significant step forward in balancing efficiency with genuine customer engagement. 

While future AI agents will surely be fast, sophisticated, and versatile enough to handle a myriad of complex scenarios, today, the best outbound contact center use cases for AI agents center on tasks that are straightforward, brief, repetitive, and with a single purpose. Examples include scheduling, validation/qualification, and payment information update calls.

AI allows us to anticipate customer needs. By analyzing past interactions and behavioral patterns, we can provide a level of personalization that was previously unimaginable. At a projected cost that’s about half the cost of human agents, with Regal Conversational AI Agents, you’re likely to improve call answer rates… and see a 40 percent uptick in conversion rates.

Learn more about the current and future benefits of AI for contact centers in The AI Advantage webinar, featuring my recent conversation with Marc Bernstein, CEO and Founder of Balto. 

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