One of those items is the headset. When you have this attached to your head, you are going to find that you are able to refrain from straining to hold the headset in your hands and that will allow you to comfortable switch between screens on your software and help you close deals faster.

Software is important to this process as well. Telemarketing software can really help to finalise purchases or log appointments, or provide you with customer information so that you can work on the sale, without having too much difficulty in the process.

Just as with any business, another item that you might consider will be an interactive voice response system. This will allow customers to call back 24 7 and be transferred to the right telemarketer. This will let people also contact you while you are on the phone and it will give you the chance to be more successful and to improve the overall sales your company has with this useful telemarketing tool.

While in the past, personal phone calls and co-workers used to make a majority of these statistics it appears that the digital age has finally gained control of the telemarketing realm as well. To help reduce these distractions, the concerned company might consider blocking certain elements.
The main disrupters are:

• Social networking websites
• Personal email
• Instant messaging
• Text messaging

Outside of personal items, we also find that there are some aspects that come into play that are beyond the control of the employer. The requirement to switch between monitors and systems also hold an impact on the level of productivity that is experienced as well.

It is with all this in mind, that to improve the results of your telemarketing department you might consider adjusting the accessibility of electronic items. This can be as straightforward as company policy restrictions going into place, or simply to increase the monitoring of such items in your company.

Because of this, you need to keep some key ideas and answers in mind when you are getting ready to make the call. Begin this process by having some questions and responses setup to the normal elements that come up. These will be things like, “Why would I consider your service?” or “We already use another company for this.” If you don’t have a solid persuasive response planned, you will have a harder time making the sale.

Along with this, you will want to have a solid knowledge of the product or services you are trying to promote. If you have to look for answers on basic questions, this will raise a red flag for the company you are trying to sell your product to. In some cases, you might find that a future conversation with this decision-maker will be difficult.  Remember, thorough product knowledge is the building block for good telemarketing calls that you make, and when you have the confidence of knowledge, you will see an increase in the successful calls that you make.

Telemarketing good practices basically follow common sense and to a great extent mirror what is good practice for businesses in general.  For instance, setting goals for various programs you have in place, and making sure these are realistic as well as measurable is a good practice.

All Sony operations in Europe are now using the system, which manages customer interactions whether by phone, fax, email, web, or regular mail, and which has multi-channel support for contact history, reporting, and case management. It also supports multiple languages. All the call centre workers get a “360-degree view” of customer information and accurate up-to-date information about Sony products.

The telemarketing concept has a strong central platform that is still flexible enough to adapt to the localised specific needs of different European countries. Sony says it is quite satisfied with the results, saying it has added many strategic benefits to their consumer electronics presence in Europe.

Sony says it now has the optimum business process interaction management system that will help them strengthen customer relationships and ultimately improve business growth.

All your headsets have warranties and service schedules, but does anyone in your organisation have any usable records of this information? Some may think it isn’t worth it, or that it’s easier and no more expensive to simply buy a new headset when one goes missing or becomes wonky.

However, intelligent headset management can save you some serious money over the course of a year. It’s not uncommon for telemarketing centres to spend 30% or more of their headset inventory value on unneeded replacements or repairs. But most telemarketing centres don’t have user histories for each headset, and if the telemarketing centre is spread over numerous geographical sites, management may not think it is worth the effort.

Knowing the location, status, warranty history, and age of headsets and keeping the information in a database can allow the telemarketing centre to manage headset inventory across numerous locations in real time. This can cut way down on unnecessary replacement or repairs, reducing the typical 30% loss to less than 10% over the course of only one year.

An online site for call centres published an article about conversational selling. One point made in the article relates to the use of conversational selling rather than the use of scripts. I have discussed this in a previous blog entitled “Call Centre Scripting”. People tend to know when the person on the other end of the phone is reading from a script. The conversation is stilted and does not flow naturally. One of the worst ways to start off a conversation is from an obvious script. Conversations by nature flow naturally so “Can I speak to the owner of the business?” Or “I am calling today to speak to you about X product” sound scripted and will be spotted by the gatekeeper straightaway. Open with the contacts name wherever possible. “Could I speak to Dave Johnson please?” 90% of the time you will be asked “who’s calling please?” then just give your name but don’t volunteer any other information unless asked. This is always a good footing to start a call and once you have settled into the call, the conversation should flow naturally.

We have all heard of students coming over to this country from different parts of the world on exchange trips. The idea behind this being as well as studying they get to experience the life and traditions of the host country they are staying in. The question is could this work in the same way for call centre agents? Just think if your company is engaged in a long term contract making outbound calls to America would it be beneficial to send your call centre agents over to the states to gain some experience of life over there. They could use the time seeing how American call centres conduct business and in theory apply this to their work back in the UK. At the same time you could have their counterparts from the USA making the trip over here and observing the way we work.