Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony is another key part of the Oracle E-Business Suite of applications. It is the module of Oracle Interaction Center that addresses outbound telephony. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony consists of two main components:
A tactical list manager, which determines who to call and when to call them
An outbound dialing engine, which dials numbers and transfers live contacts to call center agents
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony integrates with and relies on Oracle Marketing to create campaigns and lists to execute. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony serves as the execution arm for these marketing lists to maximize both outbound list penetration and agent productivity. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony also integrates with desktop applications like Oracle TeleSales and Oracle Advanced Collections to handle the actual customer interactions. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony can be used any time agents need to contact parties via the telephone.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony also integrates with Oracle Customer Interaction History to provide feedback that marketers can use to analyze and measure the success of the marketing campaign, thereby providing a closed-loop marketing process.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony does not include any other telephony management modules, and thus requires the use of Oracle Advanced Inbound Telephony.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony extends the outbound calling capabilities of Oracle's Interaction Center suite of modules, which are designed for consistent and effective customer interaction handling in a multi-media, multi-channel e-business environment.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony (Advanced Outbound Telephony) is a sophisticated application for managing the execution of outbound calling campaigns. It provides multiple automated dialing methods and extensive list management controls that improve the efficiency of outbound calling campaigns and maximize the productivity of the interaction center agents.
Out-of-the-box integration with Oracle Marketing greatly simplifies the workflow from the marketing process to managing of the contact process; coupled with out-of-the-box integration with Oracle TeleSales and Oracle Advanced Collections, the total solution eliminates the 'integration project' risks and provides a CTI-enabled applications to address the interaction center professionals for outbound calling.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony provides extensive functionality critical to maximizing the effort of executing of calling campaigns. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony provides the following functionality:
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony provides a number of dynamic release strategies and controls allowing call center manager to tactically optimize the execution of the calling list.
Interaction center managers have the capability to prioritize their objectives. Deciding the order in which a list segment is to release records can be controlled by list priority control. Interaction center managers may specify either sequential exhaustion of records from a particular list segment, or round robin the selection records from of list segments or a combination of both. Used in conjunction with a distribution release strategy at the campaign activity level and a quantum release strategy at the subset level to control the number of records pulled for release.
For some outbound efforts a list may be segmented based on geographic regions. In business scenarios such as surveys or appointment scheduling, the desired goal may be to evenly distribute successful contacts among the lists. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony quota release strategy can manage the release of records toward a goal, then block any further release of records once the quota has been met for that particular list segment, thus allowing the calling efforts to be focused on other areas needing attention.
Interaction centers are very dynamic and administrators need tools that allow them to adjust their tactics in a real-time manner. Outbound dialing strategies may need to filter out records from a certain geographical area or need to focus on calling segment that is yielding better results due to time constraints. Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony's record filter controls allows administrators to dynamically modify the release criteria of records for a given campaign activity, thus controlling the types of records that are called.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony recycling strategies (callback) defines the decision and action process after each call attempt. Recycling strategies may determine "best time to call" or determine that further efforts should be halted due to diminishing returns. The recycling decision, based on user definable business rules, may test a combination of data points to determine an appropriate course of action. The data point test may include: call outcome (ring-no-answer, busy, answering machine, SIT (special information tones, etc.), phone number type (home, work, etc.), time/date/day, outcome counters from previous call attempts on the record, or a field in the call record.
Recycling actions may include: schedule a callback at a specified time, retire the record from further call attempts, change phone number for next dial attempt, or move the record to another list.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony provides the ability to dynamically subset (segment) the calling list based on any value(s) within the customer record (customer score, address, etc.) and then control the release of the records at a subset level. In other words, set priorities between the subset, set quotas on subsets, and define the number of records to be release from each subset.
Subsets allow the partitioning of records to align to business objectives and enable interaction center administrators with more control granularity to focus calling efforts. If the calling efforts are not meeting business objectives, simply redefining the subset(s) will quickly and easily change the execution strategy.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony provides several dialing modes options that maps to a desired level of agent productivity, campaign complexity and campaign execution cycle.
Manual mode offers the full list contact management functionality offered by Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony, in an environment that is not CTI-enabled.
Preview mode offers an agent screen pop where the agent must initiate the dial via Oracle Telephony Manager's softphone.
Timed Preview mode delivers a record (screen pop) to the business application, and waits for a predefined time period before Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony launches the dialing of the record. The agent can initiate the call before the predefined time period expires, or the agent can allow the time period to expire and have Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony automatically initiate the dial.
Progressive mode offers simultaneous automated dialing with an agent screen pop.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony manages 'Do Not Call' records through Oracle's Trading Community Architecture (TCA). The architecture provides a fully coordinated effort across the e-Business application suite for controlling contact restrictions for all contact media (e-mail, phone, postal mail etc.). The architecture specifies contact control based on execution channel (telephony, e-mail, etc.), time periods for applying the restriction(s), and purpose (telemarketing, collections, etc.) for a phone number. Before any record is eligible for calling, Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony validates the record against TCA for any real-time updates, thus facilitating compliance with the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) legislation.
However, the first filtering process should take place within Oracle Marketing in the form of a suppression list. By creating a suppression list that identifies call records flagged as Do Not Call within TCA, you can effectively eliminate these records before generating your calling list. For more information on suppression lists, refer to the Oracle Marketing User Guide.
A key component to contact management is identifying the most appropriate time to contact an individual. Calling calendars used in conjunction with time zone information, define a set of callable times.
Country and regional calendars support compliance with geographical restrictions where violations of call time restrictions can have legal consequences.
User defined calendars provide the flexibility to define arbitrary callable times to reflect the demographic makeup of a campaign activity or a calling list.
Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony's real-time performance reports provide administrators feedback on the operations of the calling efforts, thus enabling them the information to adjust execution directions. The reports included with Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony are:
Record Summary Statistics Report - report provides a quick view of the record distribution for all active call-center campaigns. Record statistics include counts of records loaded, called, remaining, available, and unavailable.
Campaign Activity Record Detail Statistics Report - report provides a detailed view of the record distribution for a campaign. Similar to the Campaign Activity Record Summary Statistics report, this report provides analogous data, however drills down at a list and subset level. The report also compares calls achieved to quota objectives.
Campaign Activity Dialing Statistics Report - report helps in evaluating a calling effort. The report incorporates data for a specified period, where the maximum window is 24 hours. Data shown consist of counts and percentages for the period, including dialing outcomes (busies, ring-no-answers, SIT, etc.), and general distribution of calls in the various dialing modes.
Campaign Activity Outcome Summary Report - report provides a view of the distribution of call outcomes and results for a campaign. The report incorporates data for a specified period, the maximum window being 24 hours.
Campaign Activity Call Results Detail Report - report is similar to the Campaign Activity Outcome Summary report, providing analogous data, however drills down at a list and subset level. Again, the report shows data for a specified period, the maximum window being 24 hours.
Agent Call Results Detail Report - report provides a view of the distribution of call results among agents for a campaign. Statistical data for the report incorporates data for a specified period, the maximum window being 24 hours
Agent Performance - report provides a view of talk times, wait times, wrap times, and idle times among agents for a campaign. The report provides a means of comparing longest times, shortest times, and average times with an agent's actual times. Once more, the report shows data for a specified period, the maximum window being 24 hours.
Campaign Activity Time Zone Detail - report provides for all active campaigns, a quick glance view of the distribution of callable records broken down by time zone. Statistics are available at a list level and are aggregated to the Campaign Activity level.
There are no new features added to Oracle Advanced Outbound Telephony for this release.