Outbound communications are a core component of any modern enterprise contact center. They serve a key role in lead generation, customer retention, and market research. Unfortunately, outbound contact center testing is often deprioritized or overlooked. That’s a problem, because without outbound communication testing, messages can be misdirected or irrelevant – leading to frustration, customer churn, and potential regulatory penalties.
Like all parts of your contact center environment, outbound dialing and outbound SMS require regular, comprehensive quality assurance, active monitoring, and business testing. This end-to-end contact center testing ensures that CX performance is consistently high quality, productivity is high, and costs and downtime stay as low as possible.
Looking to start or expand your outbound contact center testing? Here’s a guide on how to get started and why it’s so important for your continued success.
Inbound contact centers vs. outbound contact centers
Whether organized as separate teams or workflows within the same agent pool, enterprise contact centers serve a critical role in customer experience and engagement. Broadly, the goals and responsibilities between inbound and outbound contact centers are unique:
Inbound contact center goal examples
- Customer service
- New orders
- Scheduling requests
- Technical support
- Account management
Outbound contact center goal examples
- Telemarketing
- Lead generation
- Customer feedback
- Appointment reminders and confirmation
- Debt collection
All of these goals are important for the growth and success of an organization. And to achieve them, contact center leaders rely on an increasingly complex network of solutions that require maintenance and regular end-to-end testing to identify customer experience issues before they impact actual customers.
Unfortunately, that’s something that many organizations fall short of. According to our 2023 State of Contact Center Testing report just one-third of contact center leaders have the visibility they need to ensure contact centers are performing as intended. For the other 66%, performance issues in inbound and outbound contact centers often go unidentified until they have a negative impact on customers. Outbound communications including outbound dialing and outbound SMS are particularly prone to these performance issues because they’re infrequently tested.
Testing outbound dialing and outbound SMS
There are two major barriers to proper outbound contact center testing today: organizational overconfidence in internal processes and lack of solutions that test outbound dialing and outbound SMS.
The combination of these two factors results in outbound calls with poor voice quality, inaccurate connections, and the increased risk of being reported as spam. Similarly, untested outbound SMS campaigns can cause customer experience scores to plummet when scheduling reminder texts, confirmation codes, and customer feedback requests don’t reach their intended recipient.
Organizational overconfidence
Given that the outbound dialing and outbound SMS workflow originates within an enterprise’s contact center and often have some type of out-of-the-box reporting, it’s easy for contact center leaders to assume that these processes are under control and performing properly. However, if phone calls or SMS messages don’t get delivered properly due to carrier or application issues this is unlikely to be flagged and may mask a more pervasive issue impacting the entire outbound communications platform.
Making matters worse, many forms of outbound contact center communications see lower levels of success: 92% of cold call recipients think unidentified calls are spam and only 2% of cold calls turn into successful sale leads. That means that untested outbound dialing and outbound SMS communications could be facing performance issues that aren’t being addressed because there isn’t a noteworthy change in success rate.
Hammer: the industry leader in outbound testing
Unlike Hammer, many of the automated contact center testing and quality assurance solutions in the market today don’t have the ability to test outbound dialing and outbound SMS messages, as well as inbound communications testing. The lack of coverage options means that many enterprises simply don’t have access to outbound testing solutions that can scale with their needs and ensure that outbound contact center communications are performing as intended.
Hammer is the only testing solution on the market today that offers contact center leaders the confidence that their outbound communications are as optimized as their inbound contact center workflows. This holistic approach to ensuring CX optimization is part of Hammer’s commitment to comprehensive, end-to-end contact center testing for enterprises and CCaaS partners.
To learn more about Hammer’s outbound contact center testing capabilities and ensure that your enterprise’s outbound contact center is delivering the service your success depends on, contact our team today.
