Enterprise Campaign Management

An Enterprise Campaign Manager solution is used to provide advanced management capabilities for the data used to conduct Outbound dialing campaigns.

Basic Outbound dialing

Not all predictive dialer solutions require customer data (usually referred to as 'call records') in order for them to work. At the most basic sense, these call records are simply a list of phone numbers to dial, however in practice companies will also provide with those phone numbers information such as the customer name, address, account number, and other information about why an individual may be being called. This data has two basic uses:

1. The dialer uses the phone number(s) provided to make the actual calls

2. to populate the 'screen pop' that is displayed to the agent when the call is connected (so that the agent knows who they are talking to and what about)

In addition to this the data that is contained in these customer records can also be used by the dialer for;

* Filtering: Most predictive dialers allow you to selectively filter which records to dial by using the data supplied in the customer record as select criteria (e.g only dial customers over 50 that owe more than £100 - naturally, in order to do this type of filtering the appropriate data such as 'age', and 'money owed' must be part of the customer record supplied to the dialer).

* Desktop Automation/Scripting: Information in the screen pop can be used to automate processing on the agents screen. For example, as part of the screen pop the customer account number can be used as a primary key to bring up the correct record in the customer database.

* Store results: Dialer will typically add extra information to each customer record that is dialed. This usually consists of the name/user ID of the agent who handled the call, the date/time(s) the customer was serviced, result code(s) etc.

For most users of dialing solutions a basic call table will provide all that they need to run a successful dialing campaign. Most companies, in order to feed their dialer with the data it needs will usually (on a nightly or regular basis) run a small program which will search their customer database for a list of records to dial. This list is then usually extracted as a basic text file which is then sent to the dialer for dialing. Once the dialing has completed the results can then be extracted back from the dialer so that the customer database can be updated with the results.

Enterprise Campaigns

Many companies run multiple outbound dialing systems across multiple sites - managing which customer records go to which call centres can begin to become a very complex and time consuming task.

Often companies need to change their dialing records or campaign design instantly - a company performing debt collections, for example, might need to know instantly if their post room receives a cheque containing a payment, or if their inbound agents receive a call from the customer making payment. Since dialers tend to run on data which is separated from the main customer database, the dialer will never know that the payment was made and will dial the record incorrectly. Alternatively a company may need to ring a customer immediately in response to them filling in a web based form.

For disaster recovery, large companies may need the ability to respond instantly to move their calls from one call centre to another should a disaster or major event occur.

Companies may wish to share campaigns across many sites, dynamically, from a central location.

Enterprise Campaign management solutions allow customer to provide a centralised control point for all data to be sent to one or (typically) multiple dialers. Rather than sending down all customer records at once to the dialer, ECM solutions provide a real time feed to the dialer, sending only a handful of records at a time. Together with advanced filtering features, real time status information, ECM solutions are a powerful tool which greatly simplify the management of complex dialing campaigns.

Integrated within CRM Solutions

* [http://www.microsoft.com/crm Microsoft Dynamics CRM]