By Joe Outlaw

Traditionally, pro-active customer contact has meant tele-marketing, tele-sales and outbound calling for debt collection.  These activities are still a large part of most business' uses of pro-active contact.  However, driven by growing competitive and economic pressures, leading enterprises across many industries are turning to pro-active contact to cement and grow profitable customer relationships.  They are using a wide variety of business applications supported by an equally wide variety of technologies.

Applications of Pro-Active Customer Contact

Among the growing uses of pro-active customer contact are:

• Calling or messaging customers directly based on customer lists for customer service or sales purposes.
• Outbound manual and automated calling or messaging customers
  • one way messaging - to deliver a message such as, "This is a message from Yuki's Flowers. Your flowers were delivered at 1:25 PM on Monday, April 4. Thank you for your business".
  • interactive messaging - to deliver a message with optional additional information or assisted service such as, "This is a courtesy message from BigCo.  All our canoes will be on sale this weekend.  Press 1 or stay on the line to hear more details about this sale." Or, "This is to confirm your appointment on Tuesday at 9 AM with Dr. Smith; press 1 or stay on the line to be connected with Dr. Smith's office to change your appointment."
• Calling or messaging customers to obtain feedback on their products/services or customers' recent interactions with the company. 
• • these surveys can be based on recent interactions, such as immediately after a customer call to customer service or soon after a purchase, delivery or installation.
  • these surveys can also be related to a company event, such as a marketing campaign or customer segment analysis, or they can be randomly solicited.

Technologies Which Support Pro-active Customer Contact

Just as there are many uses of pro-active customer contact there are many technologies and solutions to support these contacts.  They include:

• automated dialing applications, which can be operated in various states of automation, such as power, preview and predictive
• automated interactive voice response platform-based outbound applications
• notification or alerting applications, which can be event-driven or based on pre-defined schedules and which can support various modes and media, including e-mail, text messaging and pre-recorded speech
• automated survey and customer feedback applications
• widgets, which are Web-based applications to offer either live chat or live-person telephone-based service

Pro-active customer contact solutions can run the gamut from single function, point solutions such as simple alerts to comprehensive programs that would be fully integrated with inbound customer contact solutions, customer information systems and contact center applications. The point solutions, as well as the more comprehensive inbound/outbound contact center systems, can be deployed as either in-house or customer-premises based, outsourced as hosted services or a combination of in-house and outsourced.

Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for pro-active customer contact [1], Part 3 in this series will compare some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions and services on the market, and Part 4 will highlight pro-active customer contact success stories.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace.  The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.  www.outlawresearch.com