Feb 26 2017 Your Outbound Message Broadcast System Must Have These 3 Features
As I’ve mentioned before, in addition to being the CTO here at MicroAutomation, I’m also a father of four. On the one hand, this means my life is very rewarding. On the other, my life is… very full. Yes, “full” is a good word for it. There never seem to be enough hours in a day – and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for an additional weekend to help me recover from my weekends.
Having such a “full” life also means that sometimes things can slip through the cracks, even with the best laid plans. For example, those doctor’s appointments I always forget until the day before when I receive a reminder phone call from the doctor’s office. “Oh, uh, yes. Yes, of course! That doctor’s appointment – the one I absolutely 100 percent already had in my calendar. I’ll see you tomorrow!”
I’m going to guess I’m not the only one out there who can relate to this.
Putting my inability to be superhuman with my own schedule to the side, however, my experience illustrates how “outbound” customer communication isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, depending on the type of business you run, having an outbound message broadcast system is critical. It allows you to deliver important messages to customers on a range of events from appointment reminders, past due notices, order statuses, or urgent messages on a service outage or restoration.
But how effective are you at delivering these messages? And is the message broadcast system you’re using now delivering the best value for you and your customers?
Whether you’re evaluating the solution you currently have or considering making the leap to a new technology, there are three “must-have” components your message broadcast solution needs.
No. 1 Duplicate Phone Number Check
Research indicates that your customers want you to engage them when “stuff” happens. So don’t make them reach out to you when there is a widespread service outage in their area. The point of the transition we’re seeing with most businesses from reactive to proactive is to get ahead of the game by reducing customer effort and mitigating inefficient redundancies. So it’s critical to have a system in place that prevents you from calling, texting or emailing the same message to customer multiple times.
Enter stage left, your friendly, neighborhood duplicate phone number check.
If you operate in the business-to-consumer market, you’ll probably have customer contact information duplicated across multiple accounts. For example, a child might take responsibility for paying a parent’s cable or gas bill. In more extreme scenarios, we’ll see an apartment or condo office in charge of up to 500 accounts, since all of the utilities are included for residents as part of their rent.
That means, when a service outage occurs, your system might automatically export a list of 5,000 customers impacted and send them to your outbound notification system. And when the notification system starts to dial or text your customers, it must have the capability to avoid sending the same message to same phone number a second, third or even 500th time!
If that doesn’t convince you, imagine the hit your public image will take when a customer takes to social media to tell the world that you delivered an Internet outage message to them over 10 times. Or worse, what if it’s more than one customer?
No. 2 Pre-Dial (Pre-Contact) Validation
The second must-have feature of your outbound solution is the ability to validate whether to actually send the message to your customer before delivery. I know, I know. It sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often this is overlooked.
For example, it’s common to design appointment reminders or past due account notifications in a way that bulk exports a large customer list that a system will contact the next day. You might export a list of 1,000 accounts that are 45 days past due each day at 3 a.m. You schedule the outbound phone or text messages to start delivery at 10 a.m. and continue until 8 p.m., or until the list completes – whichever comes first.
But what if a customer pays the pending balance at 7 a.m., heads to work and then still receives a notification of a past due account at 11 a.m.? Or, to use my example, can you guess how annoyed I would be if I received a reminder for an appointment I had already canceled or rescheduled?
That, my friends, is how you have a customer service nightmare dropped into your lap.
So for certain applications, you’re going to want this coveted ability to check your data systems prior to sending a text, email or message to your customer. Because you need to know in real-time – not at periodic, out-of-date intervals – whether or not someone is still overdue in paying their cable bill, (Seriously, do not come between someone and their access to Netflix unless you have to. It can get ugly.)
No. 3 Location-Based Scheduling (Postal Code)
In light of the continuing consumer land line exodus to the promised land of mobile devices, the Federal Communications Commission has implemented phone number portability, which enables sentimental souls who find themselves quite attached to a particular phone number to take it with them when they make the leap. As a result, the methodology used to determine a customer’s location has changed. We can no longer depend on the three-digit area code to set the time in which we elect to contact a customer.
So the third and final must-have for your outbound notification solution is the ability to set the timezone of your customer by their location. This requires your system to maintain a list, or use a service, where you can use the postal code of your customer, instead of their area code, to set the time zone.
Setting the schedule based on the location of your customer will prevent you from calling up a very cranky customer living in Austin, Texas, at 7 a.m. because they couldn’t bring themselves to part with their beloved Orlando, Florida, number.
Final Thought
I’m sure this all sound great in theory, but to some they may also sound expendable when measured against your bottom line. If that’s you, consider this a wake up call to change your way of thinking.
Combined, these three message broadcast system features deliver the benefits of proactive customer engagement while eliminating common errors that are often the root cause of eroded customer satisfaction. In short, they help keep your customers happy with a personalized experience that demonstrates you value their time. And in this day and age, that can mean the difference between brand loyalty and a customer skipping town for your competitor.