Good Practices in Telemarketing
March 1, 2011
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.
Testing and refining of strategies and techniques is paramount to success.You need to have individuals or a team that can take your existing customer data and analyse it to see which companies and customers have the greatest possible profit margin. You need to know which organisations are most likely to use and buy your service or product so that you can focus your telemarketing efforts on businesses like these.
And this directly leads onto another good practice which is taking advantage of the flexibility that is engrained into any good telemarketing staff or agency. This means using a flexible, bespoke approach to campaigns, gaining an advantage by adapting your sales team according to market trends, and to the analysis of what works and what doesn’t work. If it does not work ditch it, but when something is working, develop it so you can be even more successful.
Sony’s Pan-Europe Contact Centre
October 9, 2010
Sony Europe’s Consumer Electronics division is now using a pan-Europe contact centre implemented jointly by Sword Ciboodle and Dimension Data. These call centres provide support for telemarketing pre-sales, post-sales, and repairs. The software engine used for the call centre is Sword Ciboodle’s CRM software.
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.
Managing A Call Centre’s Headset Inventory
October 2, 2010
Call centres use a lot of headsets. Did you know that managing your telemarketing centre’s headset inventory can save you thousands of dollars a year on needlessly replaced equipment?
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.
Conversation or script – which works for you?
May 13, 2010
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.
Call centre agents on work trips abroad!
March 23, 2010
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.