PatchThru Calling is Back

Since we sunset our Legacy version of ThruTalk in 2022, clients have been urging us to bring back the PatchThru feature, which allows callers to connect call recipients with a third party such as a legislative office.  We are excited to announce today that PatchThru is back, and it’s even better than before!  To be sure we built the very best feature we could, we talked to numerous users representing a wide spectrum of organizing programs. These conversations showed that the ideal PatchThru offering would need to be something different for everyone, and we took that challenge to heart.

While most programs plan to connect constituents to legislators, some administrators have other ideas such as media pressure or even peer to peer networking.  Programs may have one external target to reach, they may have a handful, or they may have dozens per campaign. Some data sources for the campaign contacts have highly reliable district or geographic information, but many others do not.

How much of a message do you want to pass along to the third party? Will you be reaching a voicemail or a person? Will it be complicated to get connected to your intended recipient via a switchboard, an automated voice response system, or is the line a direct connection?

We landed at offering flexibility at every point of the workflow.

You will have the ability to maintain a few or many Targets in your PatchThru Directory - and each one will have options for a few basic required fields, or several helpful optional fields. Every field you choose to apply for the Targets is searchable when you interact with your directory, apply the Targets to a campaign, and for your callers when they are finding the correct Target for a live call.

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During campaign creation, you can add one, a few, or many Targets for your Callers and easily see and confirm your selections match your intentions.  During live connections, your callers will see the same information - between calls and during them to help them be familiar, comfortable, and ready with the options you included.

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The flexibility of our script system will help you inform your callers and the contacts of the goals in mind.  You can optionally add an instant follow-up with supporting instructions and send a text message directly to the contact to help them be ready.  You can apply custom fields in contact data and use them as variables in your script to help your caller select the right person - and the same information will be available in the right hand side of the caller’s screen for ease of access.

And what about the actual connection? Your contacts may need a lot of assistance or they may be confident and independent. To solve these, we have allowed the Caller the agency to stay connected as long as you instruct them - whether that’s as soon as the connection is established or once the contact is successfully speaking with your target.  We provide visual signals and key reminders about the experience to your callers at each step to help them accomplish their task.

And your script can provide your callers with follow up questions after the call that the caller can complete before returning to the call queue so that you can collect any level of granularity from the outcome that you wish.

To put it all together, we are offering a new data export specifically about the PatchThru workflow that will collect the contact’s information per PatchThru connection, the time and duration of the connection, a success or failure indication, information about the Target reached, and information about the Caller.

We did our best to account for all the use cases, but we know there’s no substitute for real world experience. We can’t wait for clients to start making PatchThru calls and letting us know what, if anything, we still need to patch up!    

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