When customer loyalty is shrinking and satisfaction scores hover stubbornly around the mid-70s, Contact Centre Leaders are looking for new ways to stand out. In This month’s The Contact Centre Network’s latest webinar, “Bridging the Loyalty Gap Through Proactive Outreach”, tackled this challenge head-on, exploring how proactive contact strategies can drive measurable improvements in retention, trust, and customer experience.
This month we featured expert guests James Adamczuk (CX Evangelist, Zoom) and Bruce Skjolde (EMEA Vice President of Alvaria CX), the session delivered practical advice, plenty of real-world insight, and a fresh take on what outbound can and should be?
Why Proactive Matters More Than Ever
“We’ve been obsessed with inbound for years,” said James. “We invest heavily in CRMs, journey mapping, analytics, but all focused on when the customer contacts us. What if we flipped that, and used our data to predict need and initiate helpful, timely contact?”
The discussion cantered on the idea that proactive outreach isn’t just a sales play, it’s a strategic opportunity to reduce friction, close the loyalty gap, and deliver better outcomes before a customer ever picks up the phone.
Bruce echoed this:
“Outreach for the sake of outreach is pointless. But when it’s timely, relevant, and adds value, it becomes a loyalty engine.”
Outreach Isn’t Just About Calls, It’s About Engagement
One of the biggest myths the panel busted? That “outbound” is synonymous with nuisance calling. In today’s omnichannel world, outreach means multi-touch, multi-channel engagement, and it starts with smart segmentation.
Proactive contact isn’t just about picking up the phone, it’s about embedding outbound thinking into every part of the customer lifecycle. When aligned with real-time data, the results can be transformational. Here are three standout examples discussed in the webinar:
Renewal Reminders Based on Usage Data
Rather than relying on blanket reminder emails or renewal notices, leading brands are now using actual usage patterns to tailor their outreach. For example, a customer who recently downgraded a product, changed their address, or hasn’t logged into their account for months might receive a different conversation than someone with high engagement and loyalty indicators.
- A mobility insurance customer who added a second car might receive a pre-renewal call offering a multi-car discount.
- A low-mileage driver might be proactively offered a pay-per-mile policy at a reduced rate.
This kind of targeted, helpful nudge not only drives retention, but also opens the door for relevant cross-sell and upsell conversations, making outreach a value-add, not a hassle.
Service Recovery Triggered by Sentiment Analysis
Imagine a customer who just finished a chat session expressing clear frustration, but never lodged a complaint. With sentiment analysis and natural language understanding (NLU), brands can now detect that frustration and proactively step in before it festers into churn or negative reviews.
- One approach: auto-flag negative sentiment in post-interaction feedback or transcripts and queue a proactive apology call or follow-up message.
- Another: identify a negative CSAT survey and trigger a personalised outreach campaign with a resolution offer or product support.
As Bruce explained, “Smart outbound is about closing the loop before the loop even opens.” Proactive service recovery sends a powerful message: we noticed, we care, and we’re here to fix it.
Personalised Welcome Journeys & Financial Support Campaigns
The first 30 days of a customer relationship are critical. Companies using outbound to deliver structured, human-led welcome journeys are seeing improvements in retention, satisfaction, and product adoption.
- A new policyholder might receive a welcome call explaining the small print, benefits, and digital tools available.
- In financial services, banks and lenders are using outbound calls or SMS to flag early signs of financial stress, offering support or payment plan options before missed payments occur.
This isn’t about sales, it’s about building trust and supporting customer wellbeing. Especially in regulated sectors like financial services, these campaigns are becoming a vital part of Consumer Duty compliance.
“Outbound becomes your most profitable store,” Bruce explained. “It’s targeted, it’s scalable, and it delivers results where traditional retail touchpoints can’t.”
Segmentation That Goes Beyond Demographics
One of the most outdated habits in customer outreach is treating segmentation purely as a status label, gold, silver, bronze, or worse, a simple spend threshold. While these tiers may have once served loyalty programs or marketing lists, they fall short in today’s experience-led, real-time contact environments.
True segmentation goes far deeper. It’s not just who your customers are, but how they behave, feel, and interact with your brand across time and touchpoints. Effective segmentation should include:
- Channel preferences – Do they engage more via SMS, WhatsApp, email, or calls? Outreach should meet them where they are.
- Recent sentiment and interaction tone – Did their last call end in frustration, or was it resolved successfully? Sentiment signals can guide the tone and timing of future contact.
- Life events or shifts in usage – A customer who’s reduced usage or changed a product might be signalling churn risk, or a new need.
- Propensity modelling – AI can now predict likelihood to purchase, churn, or complain based on behavioural patterns.
As James Adamczuk shared in the webinar, “Segmentation is only valuable if you do something different with it.” In other words, collecting the data isn’t the goal, activating it is.
With the right outreach stack and real-time orchestration, you can shift from generic campaigns to micro-targeted journeys that feel timely, relevant, and human. Smart segmentation doesn’t just improve campaign performance, it lays the foundation for true customer-centricity, where every interaction is shaped by real needs, not broad categories.
The Agent’s Role: Empowerment, Not Scripts
One major theme: agent empowerment is essential to making proactive outreach work. The technology can tee up the right contact, but it’s the agent who builds trust, defuses tension, or drives a sale.
Bruce emphasized this point: “When you finally get a customer’s attention, you have to make that moment count. That means agent tools, insight, empathy, and support for their wellbeing too.”
With burnout a rising concern in outbound roles, real-time data on emotional load, complexity, and talk-time can help ensure agents get coaching or recovery time when needed.
Connecting the Stack: CRM, AI, and Real-Time Insights
One of the standout themes from the webinar was the need to connect the technology stack, a challenge many contact centres still grapple with. In too many operations, systems like CRM, marketing platforms, outbound diallers, and analytics tools function in silos. This disconnect creates operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities to deliver seamless, personalised outreach.
The integration between Zoom and Alvaria offers a compelling alternative: a unified real-time orchestration layer that brings together customer data, campaign management, and agent tools. This means agents no longer fumble through tabs or guess customer intent. Instead, they’re supported with:
- AI-surfaced next-best actions based on customer history, behaviour, and sentiment
- Real-time agent assist prompts to guide conversations as they unfold
- Unified campaign and customer context, eliminating friction between systems
- Built-in compliance guardrails to ensure every outreach remains within regulatory limits
This approach doesn’t just enhance efficiency, it elevates the customer experience. Outreach becomes timely, relevant, and informed by real insight, not assumption.
As Bruce from Alvaria observed during the session: “We’ve never had more data on our customers, and yet so little of it gets turned into meaningful contact.”
By integrating the stack, contact centres can finally unlock the true potential of their data, turning fragmented systems into coordinated, high-performance outreach ecosystems.
Compliance: A Catalyst, Not a Constraint
With GDPR, Ofcom, and FCA Consumer Duty regulations tightening, proactive outreach must walk the line between personalisation and privacy.
Compliance isn’t optional, it’s foundational. With frameworks like GDPR, Ofcom regulations, and the FCA’s Consumer Duty becoming more rigorous, contact centres must ensure that proactive outreach respects both customer privacy and regulatory obligations. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid outbound altogether. Instead, let compliance be your blueprint for designing better, safer, and more trusted customer experiences.
The smartest organisations treat regulation as a design principle, not a barrier. Alvaria, for example, builds compliance guardrails directly into its outreach technology, ensuring every campaign meets timing, consent, frequency, and channel-use criteria. Whether you’re operating in the UK, EU, or US, this means your campaigns can scale confidently without risking fines, reputational damage, or customer trust.
As James Adamczuk of Zoom aptly put it during the webinar, “Regulation shouldn’t scare us, it should push us to be better. Build your strategy like the auditor is watching, and make it something you’re proud of.” When compliance is seen as a quality standard, not a checklist, it becomes a powerful catalyst for CX innovation, driving smarter segmentation, more ethical use of data, and ultimately, more meaningful customer interactions.
The key? Let compliance shape how you do outreach, not whether you do it. Alvaria’s approach bakes guardrails into every campaign, ensuring right-time, right-message, right-customer targeting across global markets.
“Regulation shouldn’t scare us,” James added. “It should push us to be better. Build your strategy like the auditor is watching, and make it something you’re proud of.”
How Do You Measure Success?
Measuring the success of proactive outreach requires moving beyond traditional contact centre metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT) or call volumes. Instead, success should be defined by the quality and impact of each interaction, did it drive a positive outcome, build trust, or reduce future effort for the customer? Key performance indicators should include First Contact Resolution, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and increasingly, Customer Sentiment captured through AI and speech analytics.
For sales or revenue-generating outreach, conversion rates, retention uplift, and lifetime value (LTV) impact are critical. But success isn’t just about short-term gains, it’s also about long-term loyalty. Measuring repeat engagement, opt-out rates, and journey completion across channels will help you understand if your outreach is truly welcomed and delivering value. Ultimately, the best measurement strategies combine quantitative metrics with qualitative insight, enabling teams to not only prove ROI, but continuously refine their outreach strategy to better serve both the business and the customer.
And don’t forget qualitative signals: increased engagement, improved sentiment, and customers surprised and delighted by your approach.
Key Takeaways
- Reframe Outbound as Proactive Service, Not Cold Calling: Outbound needs a rebrand. Too often, it’s still seen as intrusive, sales-first cold calling. But the most effective contact centres today are repositioning outbound as proactive service, engaging customers with timely reminders, helpful nudges, and relevant information they didn’t have to chase down. It’s about anticipating needs, not pushing products. When done right, outbound becomes an extension of your customer care, not a sales script.
- Segment Smartly, Based on Behaviour, Not Just Spend: Traditional segmentation based on spend tiers like “Gold, Silver, Bronze” is outdated. True personalisation comes from behavioural segmentation, how customers use your products, their contact preferences, purchase history, and engagement patterns. Smart segmentation allows you to tailor outreach that feels relevant and timely, increasing both response rates and customer satisfaction.
- Empower Agents with the Tools and Information They Need: No one wants to be thrown into a call blind. To deliver a great experience, agents need 360° visibility, why the customer is being contacted, what their recent activity has been, and prompts for the best next action. Equip them with real-time guidance, AI-powered summaries, and CRM integrations. The more confident your agents feel, the more credible and caring they’ll sound.
- Close the Loop with Personalised Journeys and Service Recovery: Proactive contact should feel like part of a journey, not a one-off interruption. Use outreach to close feedback loops, check in after service issues, and guide customers through key milestones like onboarding or renewals. And when things go wrong, trigger service recovery actions automatically, based on sentiment, missed expectations, or vulnerable customer flags.
- Use Compliance as a Design Lens, Not a Blocker: Many organisations avoid outbound due to compliance fears, but this mindset holds you back. Instead, bake regulation into your design from the start. Understand the rules (like GDPR, FCA, Ofcom) and use them as a lens to build trust-first journeys. The safest outbound campaigns are also often the most respectful, relevant, and effective.
- Measure Beyond AHT, Track Sentiment, Value, and Loyalty Uplift: Average Handling Time (AHT) doesn’t tell the full story. To gauge the true impact of proactive outreach, measure the outcomes that matter, customer sentiment post-contact, increase in loyalty or retention, and the revenue generated from recovery or cross-sell. Tracking only time on the phone misses the value created through better relationships.
Final Words?
“Proactive outreach,” said Bruce, “is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the differentiator in a world where customers have more choice than ever and loyalty is hard-earned.”
