What is a Journey Builder?

Getting B2C prospects to answer your call can be a challenge. Often, the problem is not the creativity of the sales and marketing team, but the limitations of the technology they are using to make the calls. Outdated technology is leading to low answer rates.

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The most common outdated approaches to calling customers - automated sales dialers using campaigns and sequences - create one size fits all calls that are easily ignored. Journey builders on the other hand, already a critical part of email marketing, are finally coming to outbound phone sales to help brands engage customers in a more timely, relevant or personalized manner. And leading B2C brands are making the switch at lightning speed, resulting in incredible answer rate gains.

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The Old Way - Omnichannel Contact Center Software

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Manual Dialing - Early efforts at calling customers sometimes start by creating a list or CSV of leads and asking sales representatives to manually dial them from a soft phone or voip system like RingCentral, Aircall or Dialpad. If each sales representative has to manually type in each phone number, look up additional information, and determine who to call next, there is a lot of wasted time in between each call.

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Sales Dialers, Campaigns and Sequences - Over 50 years ago, omnichannel contact centers started offering automated dialers to speed up the rate at which a list of CSV of leads could be called. They automatically queue and call the next lead. Dialers are a simple and systematic way for sales teams to abstract away some of the administration and work through a batch list of leads with dialing modes like preview, power, progressive and predictive. 

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Instead of only calling a lead once, most teams like to have a campaign, sequence or series of calls to increase the chance of reaching the customer. For example, a brand might set up a sequence that calls the lead immediately and then 3 times a day for the next five days. Most often brands combine sequences and dialers to both increase the number of times a lead is called and make sure the calls are worked efficiently. Omnichannel contact centers moved to the cloud 25 years ago, but cloud products like Genesys, Five9 and or Nice have not innovated on the dialing strategies. These tools still treat every customer the same, and limit the brand’s decision to how fast to call a lead and how many times to call them.

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Journey Builders in Email Marketing

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Email marketing technology has been ahead of phone sales. In the 2010s, while outbound phone sales still treated all customers the same, email marketers moved on to cross-channel customer engagement solutions like Iterable and Braze that offered a brand new tool called a journey builder, which allowed more personalized marketing, and thus better outcomes. These new solutions offered a few important innovations: 

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• Unified Customer Profile - All behavioral, time series and CRM data is ingested into the system in real-time and mapped to the correct customer, which gives brands the ability to segment appropriately, and trigger messages based on customer actions. The real-time (milliseconds of processing) architecture allows teams to act on customer behaviors and preferences in the moment and personalize each outreach at enormous scale.
• Drag-and-drop Canvas - A no code tool that managers can use to quickly build, edit, and A/B test the exact channel, timing and messaging of outreach - all without the support of engineering.
• Cross-Channel Orchestration - The ability to trigger messages to customers across key channels like email, text messages, push messages, and now calls - all from one place.

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Common sense was proven right - if you reach prospects at the right time in the right channel with the right message (instead of treating them all the same), the engagement will increase. And the improvement in engagement rate due to journey builders has forced sales and marketing teams to rapidly replatform from “batch and send” email platforms to event-driven solutions with journey builders.

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The Regal Way - Journey Builder for Outbound Phone and SMS Sales

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Regal has rebuilt the journey builder ground up for conversational channels like phone and sms sales (instead of one way marketing channels like marketing email or marketing sms), and has rethought each feature to drive as much incremental revenue for brands as possible. Now you can get Unified Customer Profiles, a Drag and Drop Canvas, and Cross-Channel Orchestration for phone and sms sales.

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Every year brands are finding it more and more challenging to engage customers. And the outdated outbound contact center technology only lets them use a basic, one-size-fits-all “call more” or “call faster” strategy, resulting in declining answer rates and a terrible customer experience. To improve personalization and thus answer rate, phone sales teams are quickly switching to a journey builder.

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Start using Regal.io today to orchestrate cross-channel, personalized phone calls and texts at key revenue generating moments - all without engineering support. And take advantage of the other levers offered to increase answer rate too.

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Learn about these products and services at Regal.io, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.