Running outbound campaigns from a CSV: pacing, retries and calling hours
Calling hundreds of customers is a different job from calling one. How to prepare the list, set the pace and retries, and read the results.
The Vaakyo team2 min read
- Campaigns
- Outbound
- Playbooks
A campaign calls everyone on a list with one agent: payment reminders for the week, feedback calls after deliveries, re-engagement calls to past enquiries. Vaakyo works through the list within your calling hours and gives you the results as a CSV.
Prepare the list
- One row per contact, with a header row. CSV or Excel both work.
- A phone column with the country code (
919812345678or+919812345678). - One column per variable your prompt uses:
name,amount,due_date,order_id. Column names become{variables}. - Remove duplicates and anyone who asked not to be called before you upload.
The upload is checked before anything is dialled: you see invalid numbers, missing variables and duplicates first.
Set the pace
- Concurrency: how many calls run at once. Start low on a new campaign, listen to the first calls, then raise it.
- Start time: now, or a scheduled date and time in your time zone.
- Calling hours: the agent's hours, or narrower ones for this campaign. Calls wait outside them.
Retries
Decide how many times to retry a no-answer or busy number and how long to wait between attempts. Two retries a few hours apart, at different times of day, reach far more people than three attempts in a row.
Watch the first calls
Listen to the first five or ten calls of every new campaign. Problems with the list (wrong names in the name column, amounts with missing digits) show up immediately and are cheap to fix before the other few hundred calls.
Read the results
The results CSV has one row per contact: the outcome, the number of attempts, the duration, the cost and every analytics field the agent extracted. Sort by those fields to decide the next step: who promised to pay, who wants a callback, who should never be called again.