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Speed to Contact – Leveraging Phone Behavior Intelligence (PBI) for Effective Marketing Outreach

Woman with headset looking at screen

Reaching consumers is getting more and more difficult. On top of robocalls, call spoofing and fraud, constantly changing contact information used for marketing makes outreach to customers and prospects even trickier.

When it comes to the phone — a very popular communications channel — research shows a significant percentage of outbound dials go to phones assigned to a different subscriber or not in use. In fact, we found close to 90% of calls go unanswered. It stands to reason when your customer or prospect contact information is incorrect, it results in missed opportunities. You can’t conduct business if you can’t connect!

Read the eBook: Can’t Find Your Customers? A Roadmap for Optimizing Connections

Businesses and contact centers across many industries are looking for solutions that leverage authoritative contact identity and behavioral insights to identify and prioritize the best number and time to call or text customers or prospects. Interestingly, texting has seen high open rates, boosting its popularity for various communications as it allows customers to conveniently engage digitally and reduces costs for businesses.   

Suffice to say, phone behavior insights enable businesses to be far more efficient and effective: TransUnion Phone Behavior Intelligence (PBI) was found to help enterprises increase right-party contact rates by 25% on average.
 

Chart of survey results

 

Take the lead with phone behavior insights

The common driver across industries is reaching consumers how and when they’re most likely to respond to outreach, including texts and phone calls. The adage of “speed to lead” needs to be adjusted to today’s consumers who don’t trust phone calls and are inundated with many types of communications competing for their attention.   

Lead forms where consumers are actively looking for you to contact them are notoriously plagued with fake or bad leads, resulting in wasted outreach efforts and delayed speed to right-party contact. While calling a consumer who filled out a lead form is vastly different than calling a consumer about a delinquent debt, they both have one key thing in common: the need to effectively reach the right consumer.

Due to strict regulations, most debt collectors are limited in their dialing frequencies. Even though limitations may not be as stringent in other industries, it’s still critical to be as efficient as possible. Over dialing can lead to consumer dissatisfaction, spam tagging by phone carriers, and wasted resources.

PBI enables organizations to strategically contact consumers on the correct phone numbers — and during times they’ll most likely respond — making communications more efficient and effective, and helping improve outreach efforts. This is true for a variety of industries, including:

  • Financial services: Mortgage, auto, education and banking lead inquires
  • Insurance: Enrollment, account management, claims
  • Consumer services: Polling, research, fundraising
  • Utility: Enrollment, customer care, service outages
     

Putting phone behavior insights to work

Phone Behavior Intelligence helps businesses design more effective outbound communications strategies with a “contactability” score for each contact, along with up-to-date and more accurate contact data. Plus, we append each consumer record with additional phone numbers, information on phone types, in-service indicators, and risks associated with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations.

How Phone


With authoritative data gathered from proprietary and customer-based sources, including direct relationships with all major phone carriers, PBI provides unique predictive insights into billions of call transactions.
 

“Identity data doesn't age like wine — it doesn't get better. What sets us apart is we’re really good at knowing how to curate identity. We know when a phone number isn’t associated with a particular person anymore. We know when they moved from an address. That makes us stand out.”

Thomas Nowacyzk, VP of Product Management at TransUnion  
 

PBI features include:

  • Actionable phone behavior intelligence insights
    With consumer data that’s refreshed every 15 minutes, you get unique insight into billions of call transactions so you can prioritize your pool of contacts for more effective communications strategies.
  • Near real time, authoritative data
    Management of over 90% of the US caller ID market, along with deep relationships with carriers. Unparalleled coverage of wireless, VoIP, and non-public phone numbers. Authoritative contact identity.
  •  Autmatic Customer Records Management (CRM) record updates
    Append up to three additional phone numbers for each record, including phone type, in-service indicator, and risk associated with TCPA regulations.

It’s not just about right-party contact rates (RPC)

The use of solutions like PBI to enhance customer contact strategy offers many benefits, including:

  • Increased operational efficiency
  • Improved customer experience
  • Mitigated regulatory risk

Seventy-five percent of respondents in a Forrester Consulting study said their organizations had below what they considered a “good” RPC. However, less than half of respondents have implemented customer contact solutions — even though they’ve been shown to increase answer rates and RPCs.

Why not start reaching more of your leads today?

 

Do you have questions? Our team is ready to help.