Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / TransUnion Branded Calling Gets More Calls Answered
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Good morning, everybody. Today we are chatting with Zach Anderson, who's a senior industry expert from TransUnion. Zach, welcome to the Tech Matchmaker podcast. Zach Andersen: Hey, Gina, glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Gina Gibson: Let's start it off, Zach. Talk to us about the basics. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Zach Andersen: Yeah, of course. So my name is Zach Anderson. ⁓ I'm based in Raleigh, North Carolina. I serve as one of TransUnion's industry experts. This May actually represents my seventh year with the company and I actually joined TransUnion technically through an acquisition of a company they made called Newstar about five years ago. And throughout my entire time here at TransUnion, been involved in our healthcare team, helping support providers across hospitals, pharmacies, care organizations, and many others really to really help them to connect with more patients in more effective ways. Gina Gibson: Excellent. I always like to ask our guests to Zach, tell us a little bit about something about yourself that we won't find on LinkedIn. Zach Andersen: Yeah, absolutely. So I love to travel. I've actually been to over 20 different countries. Just recently got back from a trip a few weeks ago, visiting Egypt where I got to explore the pyramids in Giza and visit several temples throughout the Nile River and things like that. So I absolutely love to travel and always look forward to my next adventure. Gina Gibson: That's fascinating. ⁓ Where is the next adventure? Is it planned? Zach Andersen: Not planned yet, but there's being a few ideas that are being tossed around. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Why don't you go ahead and give us your TransUnion elevator pitch. Zach Andersen: Yeah, of course. ⁓ so TransUnion obviously is very well known as a credit bureau. ⁓ What many people don't know is that a credit bureau really only scratches the surface of who we are. ⁓ often surprises people just how much we do in the areas that we're involved with. ⁓ for years, TransUnion has actually been a leader the identity data, verification, fraud prevention, and communication space. ⁓ And my world specifically, where I spend most of my time, it focuses more on the data and the communication side, where being in healthcare, I get to partner directly with providers to help them connect with their patients in faster, more reliable ways. And looking at some of the data communications, specifically focusing on the data, we like to help make sure that providers have the most up-to-date contact information associated to an individual, helping them to fill in any gaps of information where it might be missing or it might be incorrect and then look at providing them unique insights associated to that data so that they can really effectively utilize the information that they have on an individual. And then, go ahead, Gina Gina Gibson: And I know you mentioned healthcare, you've mentioned it a couple of times, but really this is not industry specific, Like you can, TransUnion works across all industries, right? All verticals. Zach Andersen: Absolutely, yes. We work across ⁓ financial services, work across travel and hospitality, tenant employment. Every industry transient is involved and can actively support. Gina Gibson: What do you think trans union, what makes your approach different than the rest of the solutions that are out there? Kind of like, what's your secret sauce? And I think you were starting to down that path of ⁓ the healthcare and go ahead and use that as an example because it is a great one. Zach Andersen: Yeah. I would say what really separates TransUnion from the rest is the different pieces that we can help assist companies, right? And thinking about healthcare, it can really start from the beginning of a patient journey all the way to the end, right? Our tools assist in their outreach when they make phone call attempts with services like branded call display that can help a provider to reach a patient in fewer dial attempts, making sure that they can, the patient, when they receive a call, they can recognize it's their healthcare provider calling. They can actually deliver a fully customized name and logo associated to a phone call because it helps eliminate that issue or the hesitation that happens when someone sees a random phone number pop up on their screen. I know for me, I always go through that and especially if a call is being labeled to spam, that call is pretty much never going to get answered. So we can help assist with their outreach there. And then when looking at some of the data pieces, this goes hand in hand, it's very complementary to the communication side where if a business, if they have the wrong information associated with someone or their information is out of date, there's a typo, right? they can't reach that person, even if they've got some of these branding capabilities in place. So being able to work with businesses to not only make sure that they have the most up-to-date contact information, but being able to allow them to utilize it effectively and allow for their patients to understand it's their business or their provider reaching out to them, that combination really excels ⁓ in. seeing lifts, of answer rates of seeing lifts, and know downstream metrics like conversions and things like that. Gina Gibson: And it's funny because the whole answer rate, and I think the last doubt I saw was like 80 % of calls go unanswered or something like that, right? And is the combination of what you just described, is that what you call your phone business intelligence? Like is that how you help businesses break through that noise? Zach Andersen: Yes, so that they all kind of fall under what we call our true contact or trusted call solution suite. ⁓ They. range from the brand recalling solutions to looking at the consumer data, providing unique insights onto best time to call, right? So we can utilize ⁓ or analyze outbound call traffic on specific phone numbers in place because what many people don't know as well is TransUnion also powers the CNAM database to the US. So there's a lot of historical... ⁓ historical, I would say, work that TransUnion has done in the communication space. We've developed relationships with over 850 carriers in the US, which is hard to believe there is that many, but there truly is. ⁓ Yes, so the combination of looking at the communication solutions looking at insights to help businesses be able to understand Which phone number to use if they've got a mobile or landline which one to prioritize based off the usage there? And then the same for email addresses and physical mailing addresses, right? If they send like an in-home test kit or if they're sending over a time-sensitive medication and we want to make sure that the addresses and emails that they have are actually in use instead associate to that person. So the combination there really helps put that business in a strong place to serve the patients and just improve the overall level of care that they can provide. Gina Gibson: And I know we've talked a lot about the phone so far, but the same would apply to email, right? Like you guys also have a, I'm not sure, it email behavior intelligence or something like that, where you help clean the emails because people have changed their emails at a very frequent ⁓ base. And so can you talk to us a little bit about how you help with the omnichannel side? Zach Andersen: Yeah, absolutely. when looking at an email address, you're exactly right. ⁓ Emails change all the time. I know myself, I probably had five or six emails throughout my life. We're always updating emails and things like that. So looking at a specific email, we can provide what we call linkage scores. So we first want to make sure that that email is directly associated to that individual. Then we like to look at when the email was first seen out in ecosystem. How long has that email been? around. And then we can look at the activity associated to the email. Has that email seen a lot of use over the past two months, over the past six months? Because we want to let businesses know that this email is actually still in use. It's being used so that they don't waste their outreach attempts on them. Now if we see that the email address that someone has on file doesn't meet those high levels of activity or has a low linkage score, we can provide them with alternative emails that we see are highly active and highly associated to that individual so that they have an alternative form that they can reach out through. They don't just have to say, I can't reach this person via email. Gina Gibson: Perfect. And talk a little bit about the implementation journey. What does that look like? So when somebody says, yeah, okay, Zach, we are good to go. We wanna make sure we have branded calling and help improve our answer rates. What does that look like? And then how quickly can they start seeing results? Zach Andersen: Yeah, absolutely. So for the branded calling piece, there's a couple of different levels there. ⁓ There's what we call a name branded call display that allows for you all to deliver 32 characters across all the mobile devices of the major carriers. I think it's something like over 285 million devices. To get up and running with that, it's extremely easy. There's really no integration or no lift required from the end user. ⁓ That's because our direct relations with the carriers, can automatically start delivering that logo to your patients or your consumers device without them having to do anything. From the business side, the only thing that TransUnion really needs is to understand what your outbound or understand your outbound phone numbers and what essentially you want displayed. So there would be a couple different fields. There would be a 15 character landline field and then there would be a 32 character... Mobile field and that's pretty much it right and you can be up and running really within two weeks of what the name brand to call this place service now for Gina Gibson: And yeah, so Nore, I was just going to say, and then for seeing results, what does that look Zach Andersen: Yeah, so you can start seeing results as pretty much as soon as you make that first call, right? So you'll be able to track, you know downstream metrics like answer rate improvements. You'll be able to see call duration improvements. You'll be able to track and see how many times you're successfully delivering that name on a mobile device. And right, it's as soon as those we get your phone numbers and that your customized portal is created. You can really start seeing benefits as soon as you make that first call. It's a very easy product. to get started with. Gina Gibson: And what's next for TransUnion? Like does AI plant any of your offerings or anything like that? I mean, it's every everything in the contact center space is, you know, AI, how is it impacting it? Is there any anything in the future that's impacting how you guys deliver your services or anything new that you're coming out with? Zach Andersen: Yep, so we are always looking for ways to improve the experience of a phone call and then also looking at ways to help businesses when they receive phone calls as well from patients and things like that. So I know on the outbound side, just some of the things that we're looking forward to is the advancements in our logo display, being able to add customized call reasons specific to every single call, being able to add links. the links is something that really excites me because it could direct in your missed call window, could click on a link to schedule an appointment or to be directed specifically to a section of their website that is specifically related to a need that you have. So there's a lot of advancements coming there. know ⁓ additionally how much the texting world has exploded here. We've been actively working on delivering a rich text so that when you receive a text from a business, you'll be able to see a logo as well. And then ⁓ on the inbound, alongside, Transient made an acquisition of a company called Trusted a few years ago as well and something that we've been actually working and developing is ways to help businesses identify that an inbound caller is a legitimate caller. A lot of contact centers are getting plagued with calls coming from robocalls or even the spam call, same things that patients are dealing with. So we've been working with them on how can they associate an inbound number directly to a patient. and how we can look at specific insights of an actual call coming into the contact center. TIDAD-5 is coming from a real device, if it's coming from a spoof device, or ⁓ if it's coming from a legitimate patient so they can handle that call more efficiently. Gina Gibson: That's wonderful. Can you share a success story with us, Zach? I know we have a mutual customer or a few and we will be having you back to have that joint conversation with them. But do you want to share one of your success stories from your existing customer base? Zach Andersen: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll share one that was actually just happened pretty recently. You being in the health care world, right? I mentioned we work with a lot of hospital systems and one of our regional hospitals, hospitals that we work with, they reached out with a pretty alarming issue, right? They had seen reports that several of their phone numbers had been spoofed and these numbers are being spoofed. And what the bad actors or spoofers were doing is they were trying to pretend to that hospital to get patient information. ⁓ It's our working theory that they may be phishing to try to break into the bank accounts of the local branches or things like that. Some type of financial fraud is what we're thinking of. ⁓ Thankfully, a few of the patients trusted their instincts to recognize the suspicion around the call. They hung up immediately and called into the hospital system and They discovered, yeah, that was a fake call. That wasn't a call that was initiated by them, but it was still somehow utilized in their numbers. So that's when we were able to immediately start working with that hospital system on a newer service that we've deployed, is called spoof call protection. ⁓ Essentially, that eliminates anybody from being able to utilize your phone numbers from outside of your own platform, right? The calls have to have to originate directly from the devices tied or phones tied to that contact center platform, ⁓ no bad actors would be able to utilize or start pretending to do that. So we were able to help eliminate that issue, which was a huge step forward in improving the overall trust and helping to restore the brand of that hospital. And then after that initial problem was solved, we looked at implementing the branded call display. not only could they protect their patients from receiving spam calls or spoof calls, they were able to start delivering that name, improving answer rates and just helping to restore that overall trust in the phone channels so that those individuals could see that their health provider was calling. Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. the spoofers and the bad actors seem to be getting smarter and smarter, don't they? Zach Andersen: They do, yeah, they always find ways around it, but the screw of car protection has proven to be pretty successful. Gina Gibson: And just as we wrap up here, Zach, is there anything you would like the audience to know that I haven't asked you? Zach Andersen: Yeah, of course. do want to make sure that everyone in the audience knows that these solutions are not specifically related to healthcare. That's just what I work with in my day to day. Those are use cases that I'm most familiar with. These services and these solutions are providing benefits to every single type of business across the United States. They are actively being used today and seeing your different benefits and different improvement metrics that directly correlate with those specific areas of the business. Gina Gibson: Awesome. And I've always been a fan of James Lipton's acts. So to end the podcast, let's do a few rapid fire. What noise or sound do you love? Zach Andersen: All right. What noise or sound do love? I guess I would love to hear the crowd cheering. I'm a big sports fan, so hearing a crowd cheer, even if it's for the other team, it's always cool here, right? It means something exciting is happening or there's a new game-changing play occurring. So would say, yeah, crowd noise is something that I love to hear. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And what noise or sound do you not, do you hate? Zach Andersen: ⁓ car horns. I absolutely hate to hear a car horn. That's usually the complete opposite of hearing a crowd cheer. It's never usually a good thing when you hear a car horn going off. So I would have to it's a car horn. Gina Gibson: You I love it. And what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Zach Andersen: ⁓ I have been recently really getting into pickleball. would love to explore to be a pickleball player. It's something I didn't think I would love, but I somehow caught the itch of pickleball. And ⁓ I think that would be something very cool to explore to see if I could compete with some of the best. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And Zach, if somebody wants more information on TransUnion Solutions, who should they call? Zach Andersen: Yeah, I would say definitely reach out to Gina. ⁓ She's got great connections here, can always connect ⁓ with myself as well. So I would definitely say reach out to Gina and then she can help point you in the right direction. Gina Gibson: Perfect. Zach, thanks so much for your time today and for sharing everything about TransUnion. We really appreciate it and look forward to chatting again soon. Zach Andersen: Yep, thanks so much, Gina I appreciate it.