Editor’s Note: Updated with new data references as of May 2023
Do you know the secret mantra of any B2C enterprise or contact center team? Ask anyone who care about revenue generation, revenue collections or contact center ROI and this is what you’ll hear: “right customer in the right place at the right time”. This is the baseline requirement of customer engagement for Sales, Collections or Service teams. It’s what CX and Contact Center professionals call Right Party Contact or RPC.
Why RPC Matters for Revenue Outcomes
When RPC rates improve:
- You reach the right person with fewer calls & less staff, reducing both operational/payroll costs
- You improve the productivity of every agent and maximize the investment in precious human resources
- You collect on payments & debt more often and more quickly, often reducing delinquency rates and improving customer retention/CSAT
- You avoid dangerous compliance risks/penalties associated with violating TCPA
And while the rally cry of business leaders and agents across any vertical or revenue-focused customer engagement business segment, it’s NOT EASY TO ACCOMPLISH.
Most outbound contact center agents and teams tend to dial people from a pre-defined contact list without necessarily validating the information provided in an outbound campaign. The result? Low connect, contact & conversion rates!
A few reasons why you don’t get to talk to the right person in the first place:
- First, the number is wrong.
- The line is busy.
- No answer.
- You get a voice messaging system where all you can do is leave a message.
- Or, you get to talk to someone, but they’re not the person you’re targeting. According to new sales statistics, at least 50 percent of the prospects you are targeting are not a good fit for what you are selling, and calling a customer at a bad time can reduce the success rate by 40 percent. Only when you get to talk to the “right-party contact” do you get a real chance to transact.
More successful, higher-converting outbound campaigns and customer engagement require the highest possible Right Party Contact rates.
What is Right Party Contact (vs. Right Party Connect)?
Right Party Connects (RPC) is an outbound call metric that examines how well companies connect with the “right” person. It is the best measure of the overall effectiveness of your outreach efforts and the integrity of your contact database. The metric is defined as the percentage of calls made where the agent was able to connect to the intended person, divided by the total number of attempted calls.
Companies use RPC to measure the success of outbound campaigns and identify trends that reveal why some people are harder to contact than others. They can use this insight to better-allocate future resources to optimize RPC rates. A related metric measured by contact center teams is Right Party Connect, which measures the rate of connecting to right phone number but lumps in successful connections to answering machines, voicemail or immediate hang-ups before a human conversation begins. If revenue outcomes are the priority, pay attention to Right Party Contact. Revenue-generating conversions can only occur if the agent actually engages with the customer— and that’s measured by Right Party Contact.
Why is Three Main Reasons RPC is Difficult to Get Right
Technology plays a major role in eliminating data inaccuracy, but today’s most outbound dialing systems do not provide the ability to kill the root cause of contacting the right party. There are a number of quality issues in generating or identifying RPC information and how up-to-date it is as people change their phone numbers, roles, move business, etc.
- Rise of Mobile / Fall of Landlines- As mobile phones became very popular, we saw a dramatic decrease in the number of people in their homes using the landlines. According to the National Health Interview Survey, during the first half of 2014, only 44 percent of American households had cell phones. In the smartphone world, everybody can change their mobile number as often as they want. To dodge collector calls, some debtors simply change their numbers. In this case, it is impossible to contact the debtors or even get the new numbers.
- Compliance & Regulations – The rules for calling mobile phone numbers are complex. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), 1991 prohibits the use of an automatic telephone dialling system (known as “autodialers”) to contact any telephone number without prior consent from the calling party. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) also prohibits auto dialer calls to cell phone numbers unless they comply with TCPA.
- Agent Inaccuracy- If your company uses RPC as a KPI agent, it is difficult to ensure the accuracy of the RPC, logged by the agents manually. Agents can always find a way to manipulate outcomes to suit their needs. If inaccurate, these manual entries may be associated with risks.
Who or What Can Help Improve RPC?
Are you one of those companies struggling with low RPC rates? Using an advanced outbound campaign manager such as Acqueon’s flagship product, Acqueon Engagement is a proven path to more effective dialing and list & campaign management outcomes. Acqueon Engagement uses predictive analytics and AI so outbound campaigns contact people on their preferred time/channel terms. This means calling or messaging people when they’re more likely to answer the phone or text message and in turn, more likely to engage and convert. It means contacting people on their preferred communication channel, which sounds logical but isn’t easy to identify without the intelligence of an advanced, AI-powered campaign manager.
Let’s face it— if you’re a bank targeting college students with a new credit card offer and you’re calling them on the phones they reserve for 911, Mom, texting & TikTok (and calling during prime-time classroom hours on top of that) the likelihood of a successful credit card sign up is LOW.
But by leveraging the power of data, analytics, and machine learning models, Right Party Contact improves, and so does adherence to outbound contact center compliance regulations. Acqueon Engagement’s built-in compliance module ensures that all outbound customer engagement campaigns adhere to Federal, State and regionalized regulatory guidelines such as TCPA, FDCPA (i.e. “Reg F”) and OFCOM. Following a list of priority focus areas for any business that needs to increase Right Party Contact metrics:
Comprehensive Compliance – A built-in compliance module such as Acqueon’s helps clients mitigate TCPA and other regulatory penalties. This includes multiple layers of DNC filtering, wireless number identification and scrubbing of litigation participants. Other features include adherence to time zones, state-specific callable windows, threshold on contact attempts for soft compliance to avoid privacy intrusions.
RPC Verification – Acqueon’s advanced list and campaign manager provides a mechanism for verifying and completing consumer contact information (name, address, additional phones, additional emails, property, demographics, and phone attributes) for the identification, scoring, and segmentation of individuals. It provides the level of verification on a scale of 100 points that reflects the overall status of the ID verification and can be used to make a pass / fail decision when verifying a given individual.
Email Mapping – According to researchers, 17 percent of people create new email addresses every 6 months and 30 percent change email addresses every year. Equipped with one of the largest email address repositories with over 200 million email addresses, Acqueon Engagement is a campaign manager capable of mapping accurate and deliverable email IDs, providing efficiency and IP reputation. Its first validation process identifies records known to be associated with spam traps, invalid emails and domains, role accounts, complainants, known hard-bounces, etc. The second validation process filters invalid and unknown email addresses, returning a given individual’s single best match email address.
RPC Phone Scoring – A campaign manager designed to generate revenue outcomes is critical for improving agent productivity. Outbound Sales, Collections or outbound/proactive customer service teams should use predictive scoring to know which phones numbers to dial. Contact centers typically repeat call customers until a successful connection occurs. But this is one of the greatest sources of inefficiency in the outbound dialing process; using a sophisticated list and campaign manager tool can dramatically reduce or eliminate inefficient repetition while improving RPC rates.
For example, Acqueon Engagement lets users apply the phone score 0 – 200 as a decision point, allowing strategic prioritization of phone inventory. The advanced natures of Acqueon Engagement’s list and campaign management capabilities are powered by validated data and complex algorithms to create a high quality phone score.
The Bottom Line:
Outbound customer engagement can only generate revenue outcomes after a Right Party Contact materializes. Right Party Contact and revenue maximization in the contact center is an intricate and delicate balance of right person, right place, right time, right channel & right message variables. Want to see how Acqueon’s advanced campaign management software delivers on the promise of highest possible RPCs? Contact us to see the solution in action— our demo specialists will take you behind the scenes to show you where the RPC “magic” (ie predictive analytics, AI and automation) happens!