Offering to Save ANI Sometimes, a caller comes into the application with an unrecognized ANI (See also Personalization), but he or she is able to identify and authenticate successfully. If the backend will support the addition of phone numbers into customer records, this is a ripe opportunity for some proactive and future time-saving. Consider offering to save that phone number to the caller's profile or account, so the caller's next experience from that number will be quicker.

There are a couple of different places in the caller experience that this may be offered. Immediately after successful ID-authentication is one possibility. Upon task completion in support of the caller's initially stated call reason (but before hangup) is another. With the first method, because the offer occurs early in the call, more callers are likely to avail themselves of the offer. However, this approach violates the noted best practice wherein we let the caller get to the reason for his call right away. With the second approach, the advantage is that the caller's primary task isn't slowed down or interrupted. A disadvantage is that fewer callers will hear the offer because some percentage of them will have hung up or transferred to an agent prior to task completion. A second disadvantage of the at-the-end approach is doing so at the end of a seemingly unrelated task may appear to come out of left field. This can be mitigated using verbiage such as:

• System: Your payment confirmation number is 5972356. Again, that’s 5972356. Now, when you called us today, you called on a phone number that’s not in your profile. Would you like to add it, so it’s faster for us to identify you next time?

• Caller: Yes.

• System: Sure, one moment… OK, that’s been added. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Should the caller need to transfer to an agent before successfully completing his primary task, delaying the transfer with an offer to save ANI is not advised.

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