Calling customers can serve various purposes. Here are just the most common:

Telemarketing or cold calling. In this case, the call is made to an extensive database of potential customers who are not yet familiar with the company's services. The task of the call center operator is to attract new consumers with a story about the benefits of goods or services, to initiate the conclusion of an agreement with the company.

Actualization. This type of call is carried out in order to check the relevance of the customer database, both existing and potential. It can be both "cold" - updating the phone numbers of former and existing customers, and "hot" - finding out if the client still uses the product or service, upselling. Updating data allows you to find out the opinion of customers, objections and process them.

Informing existing customers. The purpose of an informing call is to tell customers about a new product or promotion, invite them to an event, or report another event related to the company's work and sales. It can also be information about the opening of new company offices, debts, etc.

Interview. Questioning is carried out in order to control the quality of service, goods or services, collect feedback, in order to compile statistics and its subsequent analysis.

What is better predictive or automatic calling read here - Predictive dialer vs power dialer: what’s the difference

The effectiveness of calling largely depends on the tools used, the qualifications of the operators, the availability of pre-compiled conversation scripts, and some other factors. At the dawn of the development of this area of ​​work of call centers, all the operator's tools were reduced to a printed customer base, a notebook and a pen. Now managers have at their disposal modern computers with special CRM programs that make it possible to simplify the process of searching, entering and storing information as much as possible. In addition, "robots" now come to the aid of the operator: automated outgoing calls to customers are firmly established in the practice of call centers. Thanks to the constant improvement of the toolkit, the “cold” call that has lost its position is becoming more and more relevant for businesses - from small to the largest.

At present, calling customers "blindly" in call centers is practically not practiced. To some extent, automation tools are involved in the process. The scenarios with the least involvement of specialized software include the Active (or Preview) option [5]. In this case, the system preliminarily displays the information card of the client on the waiting list from the corresponding database. The operator decides to call or rejects the request. Immediately before the call, the operator can view the client's card data or script (a brief summary of the previous conversation with the client): that's why this view is called Preview, or "Preview".

If the request for a call is accepted, the system makes it, the operator (agent) is waiting for the connection. When the client answers, the operator starts the conversation, the results of the latter are entered into the database manually (post-processing). If there is no answer or a busy signal, the manager enters instructions into the system on when to repeat the call.