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When making outbound calls, your performance depends on how often you reach the person you need to speak with. Calls answered by a receptionist, family member, or someone who now owns an old customer number can take up your team’s time, without moving results forward.

Right party contact helps you measure and improve this aspect of your outbound performance.

In this article, we’ve explained what right party contact means, how to calculate your right party contact rate, and what strategies you can use to help reach the right person more often.

What is right party contact?

Right party contact, often shortened to RPC, occurs when an outbound call reaches the intended recipient. Depending on your campaign, this could be a customer, a debt holder, an account holder, or someone responsible for a purchasing decision.

For example:

• In sales, you might be trying to reach the person who requested a quote, or the decision-maker responsible for buying your product.
• In debt collection, the intended contact could be the person responsible for the account, or a representative authorized to discuss it.
• In customer service, you might need to speak with the customer who reported a problem.
• In fundraising, you might be calling an existing donor about renewing their support.

The definition therefore depends on the purpose of your call. For example, speaking with an employee at the correct company may be useful, but your sales campaign might only count the call as RPC once you reach someone involved in the buying decision.

Why does right party contact matter?

Your agents have a limited amount of time to spend making calls each day. When more of that time is spent speaking with your target contacts, the team has more opportunities to make sales, resolve issues, or collect debts.

RPC can also help explain why a campaign is underperforming. If plenty of people answer the phone, but few are the correct contact, the problem may lie with your data source or the phone numbers you’re using.

This distinction matters when assessing your team’s performance. For example, some agents may get blocked by gatekeepers, and struggle to reach a decision maker. Others may reach the right person, but struggle to explain the offer being presented.

How to calculate right party contact rate

The most common way to calculate right party contact rate is to divide the number of calls that reached the intended person by your total outbound call attempts, then multiply by 100.

RPC rate = (Calls reaching the right person / Total call attempts) x 100

For example, suppose your team makes 1,000 calls in a day. People answer 300 of those calls, and 180 calls reach the intended contact.

Your RPC rate is 18%: 180 divided by 1,000, multiplied by 100. Your overall contact rate is 30%, because this includes everyone who answered, including people you weren’t trying to reach.

Some reporting approaches calculate RPC as a proportion of the total number of people reached, rather than the total number of calls made. Using this method, the same campaign would have an RPC rate of 60%: 180 divided by 300, multiplied by 100.

Both calculations can be useful. The first tells you how often a dial attempt reaches the right person, and the second tells you how often someone who answers is the person you need to speak with.

Repeat contacts and unique people reached

A call-based RPC rate can count more than one conversation with the same person in a given calculation. If an agent reaches a customer twice, this may be counted as two right-party contacts, but in actuality only one individual has been reached.

Tracking the number of unique people reached gives you another view of progress. It helps show how much of your contact list you’ve reached, especially when some customers need several follow-up phone calls to reach the intended outcome.

What counts as a right party contact?

A clear definition of RPC helps your agents record outcomes consistently. It also prevents voicemail messages, unsuccessful transfers, and unverified conversations from inflating your results.

For a campaign that requires a live conversation with the intended person, the following distinctions can be useful:

An authorized representative may also count toward RPC, depending on your campaign’s definition and the person’s authority to discuss the matter. Knowing the customer, sharing their address, or working at the same company does not necessarily establish this authority.

RPC and the final call outcome are separate pieces of information. A confirmed customer who says they aren’t interested has still been reached, even though the call did not produce a sale.

Privacy and right party contact

Confirming who has answered an outbound call is especially important when the interaction involves private account information.

For example, in a worst-case scenario, an agent could reach the correct phone number, but unintentionally disclose information to someone who is not authorized to receive it. This is especially important to keep on top of in industries such as healthcare.

In the US, debt collectors subject to Regulation F generally cannot discuss a debt with unrelated third parties, subject to specified exceptions. This makes the distinction between an answered call and a right-party contact particularly important.

The identity checks needed depend on the information being discussed and the rules that apply to the given type of interaction. A contact providing a correct name may be insufficient in some cases, and an incomplete check can be recorded separately from a confirmed contact.

Permission to call also remains a separate consideration. Confirming the person’s identity does not always establish that you have the consent needed for a particular type of call, or that further contact is allowed under applicable do-not-call rules.

What is a good right party contact rate?

There is no single RPC percentage that should necessarily be targeted for every outbound campaign. The age of your contact records, relationship with the customer, and purpose of the call all affect what sort of benchmark it makes sense to aim for.

For example, a scheduled callback to someone who requested a quote is a different type of contact from a first attempt to reach a manager through a company’s main phone number. Combining the two can hide problems in either group.

Your own results from comparable campaigns provide a useful starting point. Comparing the same type of contact, using the same calculation over similar periods, makes it easier to see whether a given change in strategy is helping your contact and RPC rates.

As a general rule, a 25-35% right-party contact rate can signal good performance on many types of outbound sales and collections campaigns, when dividing the number of RPCs by the total number of calls. However, you may be aiming for a lower benchmark when working with lower-quality data, or vice versa.

How to improve right-party contact rates

The most useful changes you can make to improve RPC depend on the specific reason that calls are failing to reach the intended recipient.

Wrong numbers, unanswered calls, and conversations that end before the person is confirmed each point to different problems.

Calling times and callbacks

Even with accurate data available, your call may arrive while someone is working, driving, or otherwise unavailable. Call results by time of day can help you identify when different groups are more likely to answer the phone.

A customer’s requested callback time gives you more specific information. If someone asks to speak tomorrow afternoon, that preference can guide the next attempt, subject to the calling rules that apply.

With contactSPACE outbound tech, you can use call-time optimization to reach out at the time of day that a given contact is most likely to answer the phone, helping to maximize RPC rates.

The results of later attempts also matter. If additional calls rarely reach anyone new, they may be adding little benefit to the campaign. This is why contactSPACE allows you to quickly shelve records that are not contributing to your business objectives – instead prioritizing the best numbers to reach out to at any given moment inside the dialing queue.

Calling line identification (CLID)

Calls can go unanswered because of what appears on the recipient’s screen when they’re being dialed. Spam labels can affect legitimate business calls, reducing answer rates or causing calls to be blocked.

Comparing answer rates across the phone numbers your team calls from can help identify this problem. If one number performs much worse on similar types of calls, its reputation is one possible explanation to investigate with your telco provider.

contactSPACE allows you to automate the process of managing call-line identification (CLID) rotation, helping to maximize contact rates across any type of outbound campaign.

For example, if a given number fails to answer on the first attempt using a landline number, the second call may use a mobile CLID, if this would help maximize the chances of getting in touch.

Number reputation is also managed closely, to help you identify CLIDs with poor answer rates that may need replacing.

A clear call opening

Reaching the correct number is only part of making contact. The person answering the phone also needs enough information to understand who is calling, to help make them feel comfortable in identifying themselves, or passing the call along to the right person.

A clear introduction can help, especially on colder types of phone calls, where the customer might have less of an immediate idea of what the conversation is about.

contactSPACE CallGuides let you build intuitive, campaign-specific workflows inside the agent interface, giving them the information they need to help reach the right party on a given call, and providing the context needed to help progress the conversation forward with a given contact.

For an RPC-focused campaign, this guidance could cover introductions, making an ask (such as to recover a debt), and how to reach the right party when someone else answers.

Agent availability when someone answers

When a customer answers a phone call but no agent is available, you can lose the chance to establish right party contact. This can happen with predictive dialing, which places calls ahead of agents becoming free.

Dialing pacing and other settings can therefore affect whether answered calls turn into conversations when predictive dialing. contactSPACE helps to automatically minimize abandonment, including maintaining outbound compliance in regions where abandonment is controlled by the regulator.

Contact through other channels

Some customers may be easier to reach by email or text message, rather than over the phone. Where needed, a message can give someone a way to arrange a call, or respond at a time that suits them.

contactSPACE helps you make effective outbound contact across voice, email, SMS, and other channels, allowing you to use these other mediums as a part of a cohesive contact strategy to maximize RPC rates.

How to use RPC with other metrics to improve performance

Apart from monitoring your raw RPC rate, to assess the quality of the contact you are making, you might also look at the number of unique people reached, the cost of reaching them, and the outcomes of those conversations. Together, these metrics help you assess whether changes are producing more useful contact.

For example, suppose two comparable campaigns each make 1,000 attempts. One reaches the right person on 150 calls, and the other does so on 200 calls.

If both convert 20% of those conversations into sales, they produce 30 and 40 sales respectively. This illustrates how better RPC performance can increase results, even when the success rate after reaching someone stays the same.

Cost per right party contact adds another perspective. Dividing campaign costs by confirmed right party contacts shows what you’re spending to reach each good-quality or appropriate contact.

Comparisons by contact list, time of day, and attempt number can help identify where performance differs. Agent comparisons are more meaningful when you also account for the type of records each person receives.

contactSPACE provides thorough, multi-dimensional reporting segmented by agent, team, and campaign, along with comprehensive tools for reviewing call recordings and managing quality assurance. The solution is also easy to integrate with third-party reporting and business intelligence tools, and AI-based voice analytics, to keep on top of ongoing performance.

With your RPC outcomes defined and recorded consistently, you can use these metrics to assess changes to your contact strategy, and significantly improve oubtound performance – no matter the type of contact you’re making.