Benefits of Using List Management Services (LMS) as a Part of Your Call Center Infrastructure?

Every call center generates humungous amounts of data from across multiple channels. You generate through voice, email, website, chatbots, social media, surveys, and the like. Besides, you also buy lists for your outbound reach-out needs.

What do you do with all of this data?

They have to be managed effectively for you to provide exceptional customer experiences.

This is where list management services (LMS) come into play.

An LMS helps you massage and mine the data from various sources. With LMS, you can sort, filter, review, and enrich the data and make it actionable for your stakeholders.

What Are the Benefits of Using a LMS in a Contact Center?

Let us look at this through multiple use cases.

You buy a massive list from a vendor for your outbound campaign needs. Now, you have hundreds of thousands of data points. How do you allocate them to your agents?

With list management services, you can slice and dice the data the way you want. You can define the entire data management workflow, and you can segregate the list in multiple ways.

For instance, you can segregate them by verticals, geography, revenues, number of employees, and whether they are using any competitor products. These variables are defined here only for understanding purposes, though you can segregate the data in multiple ways.

Check this article on : How Data Management Services is Crucial For Your Contact Center Platform

Once you start calling, it can identify which lists work well, which segregated data works well, and what needs to be dropped, making your outbound campaign cost-effective and efficient.  

A customer reaches you via email for an upgrade of his subscription. He finds the pricing high, and hence, the customer decides to hold off for a few months before making the purchase. After a few months, he responded to one of your offers, stating that he would be interested in looking at an upgrade. You are assigned the role of talking to the customer and helping them in purchasing the upgrade.

What do you do here?

With a list management service, you get access to all the customer interactions, and now you are completely aware of all the interactions right from the first email to the time he responded to your offer.

Armed with this information, you would be able to address the customer’s needs better and convert them easily.

You are in the third-party debt collections space, and you help your customers collect from all around the United States of America. However, every state requires you to follow certain fair debt collection practices, and one of them is that you cannot call anyone after a particular time of the day.

This is a classic case where LMS can be really helpful. LMS would take into account all the debt collection regulations and compliances and ensure that agents don’t even dial their debtors after a particular time during the day. It helps scrub the lists so effectively that agents would not even notice them.

Look at this use case in the debt collection industry. You have to reach thousands of debtors to collect overdue payments. Your current approach to reaching out to the customers isn’t very effective. What do you do?

LMS can help you leverage customer data to optimize collection strategies, reduce delinquency rates, and maximize recoveries.

For instance, if a debtor is delaying payments consistently for over three months, LMS will pull that data out and put it in the high-risk category.

That’s the trigger for the lender to speak to the customer, understand the issue of the delay, and even restructure the payment to make it easy and maintainable for the debtor.

It also helps prioritize accounts based on Days Past Due (DPD). It enables you to bucket them into categories, such as DPD 30 days, DPD 60 days, and DPD 90 days, and prioritize them. Similarly, LMS will also segregate data based on the value owed.

If the debt is greater than 100k, call them immediately; if the debt is between 50 and 100 K, then call when the DPD count exceeds 30 days; if the debt is less than 50 K, then send periodic payment reminders in the form of email, text, and messages.

This would improve your collections while utilizing the agent’s time effectively.

You are an online retailer with hundreds of thousands of customers. You want to reach out to customers who haven’t purchased anything from your platform in the last six months.

List management services will pull out all the customers who haven’t purchased from you in the last six months, their purchase history, product preferences, and engagement with earlier marketing campaigns.

This will give you a fair idea about how to target them and come up with a re-engagement strategy. Maybe offering a discount on previously purchased items or items related to it might bring them back to the platform. If not, at least this reach-out will put you back on their radar when they think of the next purchase.

How Does a LMS Help Maintain Data Security in Call Center?

With LMS:

• You can incorporate role-based access controls, which allow only those with proper permissions to handle sensitive information.
• Your data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, which helps protect it from breaches.
• You can do data masking, which allows you to hide details like customer names, credit card numbers, and social security numbers from agents or systems that don’t need access to this data. This proactively reduces data risks.
• You can maintain an audit trail that allows you to hold people accountable and support compliance with regulations.
• You can secure data using protocols like SSL to ensure that data transmitted between systems is protected.
• You can validate and cleanse data in real time, which helps maintain data integrity and reduce the chance of vulnerabilities arising from inaccurate or corrupt data.

How Does a Typical LMS Work?

Step 1: List Management acts as the centralized data repository, where it gathers all the customer data from various sources like calls, emails, websites, chatbots, social media platforms, and surveys. This collation makes it easier for agents to access them.

Step 2: You can slice and dice the data per your needs. For instance, you can slice them based on demographics, purchase history, and call outcomes. This would allow you to focus on specific customers and provide them with the necessary personalization in your customer communication and offerings.

Step 3: You need to validate the existing data points and remove duplicates, correct inaccurate entries, and update outdated records. This would help reduce data errors and improve the success of your outreach initiatives as well as customer experience.

Step 4: What happens to the data that keeps coming in from various sources? Your LMS helps you update them in real time so that your agents and customer-facing resources have access to the updated information, allowing them to provide the best possible customer experiences.

Step 5: Integrate your LMS with the internal CRM, dialers, and IVR to ensure that customer data flows smoothly across different tools and platforms, making it easy for your agents as well as the customers. [While this is strictly not step 5, I have put them here for convenience.]

Step 6: You can generate comprehensive reports on how your lists are performing, which segregated data work best and which ones don’t, and assess call success rates, customer engagement levels, and list saturation. The best part is that all of these are in real time.

Would you agree that these would make the lives of your agents and customers easier?

I bet you would.

In summary, LMS can make sense of the enormous amount of data you generate and handle as a call center. It helps you slice and dice – sort, filter, review, and enrich the data to make it actionable for everyone.

Despite sounding cliched, I have to state that “Data is the new oil,” and LMS helps you make the most of it. 

It allows you to bring hyper-personalization to your customer interactions, thereby improving campaign outcomes and efficiency.