Political Campaigns Turn to Outbound Calling to Reach Constituents
September 13, 2012
By Rachel Ramsey, TMCnet Web Editor
As we say goodbye to summer and hello to fall, we also welcome another season: political campaigning season. For those politicians working to reach out to constituents, the most effective solution may be an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
If you’re running a political campaign out of a local office, you likely don’t have the budget for a dedicated, fully-staffed outbound call center. Automated outbound calling for political campaigns can provide candidates with a modern and cost-effective approach to leveraging voters.
Automated candidate calling promotions are a budget-friendly way to target registered voters and gain name recognition before election day. It’s also the easiest way to survey constituents and to best understand what’s important to them this election season. Political outbound calling can provide your potential supporters with important information, while helping you to capture valuable data to win your election.
Companies seeking to establish their own outbound or telemarketing campaign can easily do so, especially with the Nimblevox cloud solution offered by Interact, a provider of IVR solutions. The company simply needs to put together a list of individuals to call, agents willing to make the calls, a script, desktops with Internet access and the campaign is ready to launch.
With an IVR system in place, some of the steps involved can be automated, minimizing the amount of time an agent needs to spend on the phone. As a result, more contacts can be reached in less time, reducing the cost per call. When implemented correctly, the IVR system can also help drive conversations.
Once the campaign has started, monitoring of the calls is critical to overall success. This process not only allows call center managers to ensure all agents are following the script and converting when given the opportunity, but also that the IVR system is working correctly. The recorded calls can also be used for training purposes, giving feedback to those who need a little work to improve and to demonstrate to others what they are doing right.
With the Nimblevox solution from Interact, companies can easily design, deploy and manage voice applications, an IVR system, SMS campaigns and even telephony services operating in the cloud. The solution provides an easy drag and drop service creation tool to create voice, call flows and SMS applications.
Users can quickly set up successful outbound blast calling campaigns with Blast, including political campaigns, emergency notifications and retail marketing. Setting up an outbound dialing campaign with Nimblevox’s Blast can be completed by uploading your phone numbers, adding your prompt files, clicking “run” to start the campaign and viewing your campaign results.
Plans with Blast begin with support for 10,000 calls per hour. Users can create on-demand or prescheduled campaigns, create and upload separate messages for live answered calls and answering machine messages, and set criteria for the campaign to stop once the desired numbers of successful calls has been reached.
After a campaign, Blast generates reports that display how many calls were made, answered, unanswered, how many messages were left on an answering machine, call hang-ups, call completion percentage and call data.
Be prepared to reach as many of your constituents and keep you campaign as cost-effective as possible before the big day.
To learn more about Nimblevox, click here.
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Edited by Jamie Epstein