Beating the Summer Lull
September 4, 2010
If your telemarketing centre experiences a “summertime lull,” you may wonder if it’s worth the effort to keep sales figures up during these slow months. But the calls you don’t make are sales you won’t get. Sure, many people go on holiday in the summer, but there are ways around the summer lull.
Keeping in touch with prospects throughout the summer will help prevent other telemarketing centres from whisking them away from you. So don’t let your prospects forget about you. If you shelve these follow-up calls during the summer, there are others ready to woo them during that time.
If it is difficult to track down prospects during the summer or get them to make a decision, then it’s a prime time to set up your appointments for later in the year or simply build up your relationships with prospects. Consider the effort spent doing this as investing in later sales.
On the other hand, some industries really do close down for periods during the summer, creating a telemarketing “blackout.” If you find out which industries these are, you can plan your telemarketing efforts around it. This will help you avoid wasting time calling businesses that simply aren’t available in the summer.
Refresher Training for Telemarketers
August 28, 2010
Regular refresher training for telemarketing workers is a good idea, and summertime may be the ideal time for it, due to the high number of people away on holiday and therefore unavailable. Sometimes, in the thick of day-to-day calling, it is easy to forget some of the underlying fundamentals of telemarketing training.
For instance, it is important for telemarketing professionals to remember to come across as someone the prospect wants to call back. Voicemail is not necessarily a dead end. Telemarketers miss out on opportunities by not leaving voicemail messages. Leave your name and number, the important reason you are calling, and a more important reason they should call you back. You should repeat your name and number before ringing off.
Another fundamental is being both interested and interesting when making cold calls. By encouraging prospects to talk about themselves, taking notes, and then using their words in your sales pitch, you will establish a degree of intimacy that makes it easier to make a sale.
Business may have slowed during the summer, but refresher training doesn’t have to take a holiday.
Call centres could soon be using Tweets
August 21, 2010
Call centres could soon be using Tweets as well as SMS, voice calls, and emails as a means of improved customer service operations. IPscape, an Australian cloud-based vendor of telemarketing contact centre products now has a beta release product that uses Twitter as part of its multi-channel solution for contact centre technology. With this capability, contact centre managers may assign people to respond to tweets that are in the queue.
IPscape’s contact centre technology requires just a browser and business-level broadband connection and gives clients inbound and outbound contact that can scale up to meet call and tweet volumes. The speed of response is the biggest selling point.
Like SMS messages or emails, tweets are queued, and are then sent to the designated approved “tweet agents.” Tweet agents may also answer voice calls, further increasing productivity. Proactive tweeting can inform followers of important service messages or emergencies.
Tweet statistics and measurement are part of IPscape’s approach so that management can compare all the inbound communications channels. This will allow better understanding of how to improve customer service.
Is your call centre damaging the environment?
April 23, 2010
At the end of each day do your telemarketing staff leave their P.C’s switched on or do you leave more lights on than is really necessary overnight?
Now, even if you are not really convinced about the green issue you have got to believe that a thing like leaving lights on is just a waste of money if nothing else. I also believe in recycling, as we all know the planet does not have infinite space and we cannot carry on just filling the landfills, so what we are doing in effect is sweeping the problem under the carpet. Recycling paper is another common sense thing to do. Get your telemarketing call centre staff to re-use paper that has only been printed on one side for making notes or reminders. This cuts down on stationery costs and if you believe everything saves some trees!
On a serious note measures like this can save call centre or telemarketing agency money and just makes plain sense in the long run.
Can you improve sickness and absence at your workplace?
April 13, 2010
Does your call centre or telemarketing agency suffer from repeated sickness or absence and are you doing enough to combat this. Most businesses across the country will find from time to time sickness related absences will be a problem. Now for the majority of cases this is probably due to genuine circumstances but there are invariably some cases where people have the day off just because they feel like it.
The question is what can be done about it. Some companies offer a bonus schemes that reward not only employees performance at work but also their attendance. This makes employees think twice about having time off just because it happens to be sunny outside or for other unknown reasons.
One of the best ways to improve absences is to implement a sickness and absence policy where people have to have a back to work interview after short periods of absence. This again encourages people not to take the day if they are going to be questioned about it when they return. Whichever policy you decide to implement you need to make sure all employees understand it and most importantly your call centre or telemarketing agency needs to adhere to it.