Managing contacts with customers and prospects is challenging work. Optimizing the contacts that you make to ensure maximum efficiency even more so. RedPoint Contact Optimization provides a process framework that addresses all of these challenges.

First, you need to get your hands on some leads. Then you need to filter them. Then you have to analyze your remaining data, determining who you want to market to, what products to offer them, and how you want to get in touch with them. Then you need to actually make contact and, having done so, maintain a long term relationship with the person contacted. Finally, you must monitor and improve the performance of your customer contact operation.

The first step in the process of contacting a potential customer is to identify them. RedPoint Contact Optimization enables you to obtain leads from a variety of sources and consolidate them in a single repository:

• Upload your own data using RedPoint Data Management
• Access existing internal databases
• Configure and load external batches of data
• Obtain real time leads from either RedPoint hosted web advertisements or third party vendors

The adage “garbage in, garbage out” is not widely repeated without reason. You don’t want to waste valuable time or money making contacts that aren’t valid, and no matter where your data comes from, some of it will be bad. The next step in the process is to filter out the leads that are not viable for one reason or another. RedPoint Contact Optimization makes it simple for a business user to set up rules to:

• Throw away leads that don’t contain enough information
• Standardize names and addresses
• Remove duplicates that have already been received
• Match to existing data sets and obtain additional information about a contact
• Remove leads that are otherwise unmarketable

Now that you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff, it’s time to drill down further and determine what you want to do with your leads. RedPoint can work with you to develop a scoring model to analyze the lead and take appropriate action. The scoring process can be used to:

• Provide a recommended product offering – perhaps offering an upsell to an existing customer, an entry level product to a college student, or a family package to a busy mom.
• Match call center agent skill sets with a contact’s characteristics. For companies with large product catalogs, it may not be effective to train all agents on all products. Routing calls and leads to specialized agents for specific products can reduce significantly reduce upfront training costs.
• Choose the most effective channel to reach a prospect. Some customers may respond best to electronic communication; higher value customers may warrant a specialized sales representative to contact them for a more personal touch.

After the scoring process is complete, it’s time to reach out and make contact. RedPoint offers a robust multi-channel customer contact application. Agents can use this application to:

• Handle inbound calls with dynamic scripts
• Conduct outbound campaigns based on contact lists, or in reaction to receipt of a real time lead
• Trigger manual or automatic emails and text messages
• Utilize social media messaging, via channels such as Twitter or Facebook
• Schedule downstream processes, such as a callback or credit check
• Transfer leads to a third party vendor, either in real time or as a batch feed

Dynamic scripting allows agents to observe as the customer’s details are updated in real time, leveraging the scoring and scrubbing capabilities described above to increase product recommendation efficacy as a more complete picture of the customer is made available.

Your relationship with a customer or prospect equates to the complete history of every interaction with them. RedPoint Contact Optimization retains a detailed history of every contact, which is made available to agents as required.

In addition, automated triggers can be set to schedule additional contacts after a certain period of time, or following another event – for example, immediately sending a welcome email after a sale is made, or scheduling an outbound telemarketing campaign 30 days after a direct mail.

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it." - Sir William Thomson

RedPoint Contact Optimization is tightly integrated with RedPoint Visual Analytics to provide a robust reporting capability to analyze and improve performance of:

• List yield – reporting on the effectiveness of lead sources which can be used to make more intelligent purchasing decisions
• Agent performance – allowing you to manage the performance of your customer care agents – from conversion rates to average call handling time
• Channel effectiveness – examining the effectiveness of various inbound and outbound channels and facilitating more informed decisions around where to invest future marketing spend