About
To boost efficiency in our inbound contact center, we developed an outbound dialer system which detects unused capacity and initiates calls for targeted value-add campaigns, benefiting our overall product engagement without requiring additional staff
Innovation presentation
Traditionally, the Vitality contact centre was structured in a way where majority of the servicing was done through the inbound call centre. Members would predominately call into Vitality call centre for assistance with their benefits.
• There are always several Vitality engagement related initiatives that require our servicing teams to call our customers/members, where the traditional ways of communication i.e. email, sms and WhatsApp messaging might not have the desired uptake. These engagement initiatives entail helping members to activate benefits, encourage utilisation of value-added benefits and provide our customers with a deeper understanding of various benefits the programme offers.
• Traditionally, the Vitality Servicing Team would only be in a position to help make these outbound calls on an ad-hoc basis as and when capacity existed and would need to be physically scheduled to make outbound calls taking these resources away from their primary function as inbound servicing consultants. This admin intensive scheduling process to enable outbound calls resulted in effiency loss and diminished output leveraging the existing capacity.
• In urgent cases the business would employ additional resources on a temporary contract basis in order to fulfil these additional responsibilities, resulting in additional costs for the organisation.
• In 2023, we embarked on an in-depth analysis exercise to explore additional efficiencies that might exist in the servicing space. During this exercise we found that the call centre was sufficiently staffed up to adequately meet the inbound call centre service level KPIs.
• We also discovered that there were less busy sporadic intervals during certain days of the week where call centre agents sat idle waiting for the next caller to come through.
• We embarked on a brainstorming session with our technical teams and business to figure out how to
harness this unused capacity to meet the demands of fulfilling the engagement related initiatives the business required.
• After lengthy solutioning sessions with our development teams and our telephony vendor, we arrived at a solution that we’ve called the Vitality Servicing Automated Outbound Progressive Dialer.
• We consulted with various internal experts to flesh out this solution and the various parameters associated with it and after months of working together we were finally ready to implement.
• This solution that was implemented catered and met the requirements of allowing agents to automatically switch between inbound servicing to outbound servicing in real-time, without impacting Inbound service level KPIs. We built in configurable parameters to ensure we were able to tweak what capacity looks like whilst balancing the SLA requirement real-time.
• Upon the successful implementation of the solution, Vitality was able keep agent resource costs unchanged and at the same time expanding their reach to thousands of our members, assisting them to unlock value in their benefits and increase their engagement levels.
• Overall, we were now able to meet the demand of these various initiatives without having to incur more costs or hire more people.
• Over the period of 5 (five) months, through the dialer solution, 61,146 (sixty-one thousand one hundred and forty-six) outbound call attempts were made to members.
• Successful contact to members was 5,714 (five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen).
Out of the successfully contacted members, 1,365 (one thousand three hundred and sixty-five) members successfully completed the call to action. Thus far, the solution has provided Vitality with a 24% (twenty-four percent) conversion rate on the call to action requested of the member.
Uniqueness of the project
Vitality servicing currently utilises the Genesys platform as the telephony system to service its members.
• It was identified that it offers a feature that caters for outbound calls, through progressive dialer functionality. This feature was not designed to automatically switch between inbound and outbound calls in real-time.
• The business requirements were presented to Genesys, and they identified that there was an opportunity to enhance their platform and meet Vitality’s business needs.
• To address the business requirements, the technology needed a bespoke solution, configuration and retrofitting of the Genesys off-the-shelf Progressive Dialer solution. Project team was specially formed to ensure the solution had the following capabilities:
- Assess the servicing levels in real time and determine whether capacity is available to also have certain agents make outbound calls for planned campaigns.
- Have configurable parameters and business rules which govern when and how agents can be switched from servicing inbound calls to servicing outbound calls. Parameters include:
o Number of agents who are idle for a specified period and not servicing inbound.
o Service level percentage (i.e. percentage of calls that are serviced within set waiting time)
o There should be no calls holding on the Primary Core servicing skill to initiate outbound calls.
o Workforce management teams to have the ability to remove the outbound proficiency and disable outbound campaigns should the primary SLAs take strain.
o Initiate pop up and alerting functionality via Vitality’s CRM and Servicing Portal to alert the consultant of the switch from inbound to outbound
o All measures and parameters should be configurable.
- Automatically switch the agents’ calling mechanisms from receiving inbound calls, to making outbound calls and be able to clearly alert the agent when the switch happens.
- Allow business and workforce planning to monitor through various real time reports and dashboards to understand the effectiveness of the switch and service levels to be able to make workforce adjustments in real time.
- Integrate with Vitality Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and servicing platform to allow agents to be able to continue to efficiently service members.
- Dialler frequency and redial rules which can be defined based on business preferences. This is to determine how many re-tries and cycles would be automatically made before the outbound call attempt is stopped.
- Recording on the outbound call outcomes (i.e. Busy, Answered, Answering Machine Detected, Engaged etc)
- Comprehensive reporting based on business needs (e.g. Month to Date, Daily, Outbound Attempts vs. Call Outcomes etc)
- Allow business to plan for and schedule to run multiple outbound campaigns (e.g. Assist members with benefit activations, encourage members to complete assessments linked to their benefits and associated discounts etc) across different agents which service different benefits (i.e. different skills)
- Over the period of 5 (five) months, 61,146 (sixty-one thousand one hundred and forty-six) outbound call attempts were made to members.
- Successful contact to members was 5,714 (five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen)
