Have you ever considered how the notifications you receive from businesses help simplify your life? Have you noticed the notifications can make your customer experiences positive and proactive rather than reactive?

For me, proactive customer communications is all about receiving personalized alerts, confirmations, and reminders from organizations I do business with. Let me share a few examples of helpful and timely communications that I receive which make my life easier:

1. Prescription Refills: I signed-up to receive text alerts from my pharmacy for my automatic monthly prescription refill.

    1. They send me a text message reminding me that it’s time to pick-up my Rx

before

    1. it’s due to run out. This notice gives me a few days to get around to picking it up, at my convenience, and eliminates scrambling to drop it off, wait, and pick it up after I’ve run out of my medication.

2. Power Outage Notifications: I opted-in with my local utility to receive automated outage notification calls on my mobile phone. Proactively knowing that the power is out in my house while I’m still at work allows me to plan better—such as picking up take-out dinner on the way home rather than finding out there is no way to cook dinner when I get home with two hungry kids on my hands. Receiving the proactive notification when the occasional power outage does occur (along with the estimated restoration time) helps me make the best of a not-so-great situation.

3. Appointment Reminders: I provided my family’s dentists and doctors with consent to send me reminder emails for upcoming appointments. I usually schedule dental and medical appointments months in advance. And yes, I do put them on my calendar, but I find it helpful to also receive a friendly and proactive email. This not only allows me to confirm an appointment a few days in advance, but also provides options if I need to reschedule.

What do all three of my experiences have in common? The answer is that they all abide by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) because these businesses used my prior express consent to contact me over my preferred channel. In the US, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulates these types of outbound communications with the ultimate goal of protecting consumer experiences. Recently, the FCC strengthened the TCPA with a landmark (138-page) 2015 US ruling, which heightened awareness for organizations to comply with requirements for capturing express consent, revoking consent, managing reassigned numbers, and clarifying the definition of an auto-dialer.

Smart organizations are not letting TCPA compliance requirements slow them down from proactively engaging with their customers. They know how important it is to keep customers informed about their accounts, the products, and services they use, and those they are interested in. These organizations are evolving their outbound strategies to meet compliance requirements and truly benefit from the intended purpose of delivering great experiences by engaging customers over their preferred channels in a timely and personalized manner.

According to a recent Forbes article, 87% of consumers are like me and want to be proactively contacted by organizations they do business with. Simply stated, this statistic supports a flexible outbound engagement solution for sending compliant communications to customers. You gain the benefits of:

  • Improved customer experiences
  • Simplified compliance efforts
  • Deeper customer loyalty
  • Higher ROI from their outbound campaigns

Want to learn more about the TCPA ruling and its impact on customers? Please check out our new Genesys Executive Brief,  6 Ways to Mitigate TCPA Compliance Risk in Your Outbound Customer Engagement. We’ve taken a deep dive into the TCPA ruling, offering integrated opt-in best practices, tips, and tools to help mitigate risk and simplify your compliance efforts.

Here is just a sample of some of the topics included in the executive brief:

  1. Capturing express consent from consumers: In the US, a customer’s opt-in is required for a business to use an automated dialing system to call or text them on their mobile phone; however, with a landline, you’ll only need opt-in for telemarketing calls.
  2. Identifying phone type: Knowing which phone numbers in your contact list are landline and which numbers are wireless is critical since the rules governing outreach to each phone type varies.
  3. Managing reassigned numbers: Requires removal of phone numbers in your opt-in database where service has been cancelled and it has gone back to the carrier’s pool of numbers to be assigned to other phone subscribers.
  4. Verifying phone ownership on a regular basis: Validate that the current owner of a phone number is the same person who provided opt-in consent to your company.
  5. Implement business rules and contact controls: Make sure your outbound engagement solution gives you self-service campaign management tools that let you easily customize your outbound programs to meet compliance requirements.
  6. Providing reasonable means to revoke consent: Include opt-out mechanisms in all your outbound communications so that “consumers can revoke consent at any time and through any reasonable means.”

Download the Genesys Executive Brief today!