Customer Service

Using Outsourced Call Centers to Convert Marketing Research into Sales

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on November 22, 2011

Marketing research is a valuable business tool that can be used to discover emerging trends, assess sales performance, evaluate marketing campaigns, measure customer service and define company goals. When properly analyzed and applied, marketing research will eventually lead to greater sales volume and provide an acceptable return on investment. (See our November 17, 2011 post on outsourcing marketing research to increase ROI.) Marketing research is generally considered to be an investment in future sales with an indirect impact on a company’s bottom line. That attitude has become so entrenched in the business community mindset that the potential to immediately harness marketing research data to directly impact real-time sales is often overlooked.

The goal of marketing research is to collect data for analysis. In a company’s marketing department, it is data analysis rather than the data itself that is considered valuable. However, forward-thinking companies are putting that raw data to immediate use in their sales departments and doubling their marketing research ROI. The key is outsourcing tedious data sifting to a highly-qualified call center

When processed by experienced call center professionals, raw marketing data can generate qualified sales leads, monetize trade show and conference leads, and increase repeat business. An expert call center agent can plow through long lists of potential leads obtained from marketing surveys, internet contacts, trade shows and conferences and cull out those leads with the greatest sales potential, allowing your sales staff to concentrate on closing sales. An expert outsourced call center agent can also be used to contact existing customers, generating direct sales and noting future needs to help your sales force best direct its energies.

The key to success is finding the right outsourced call center partner. Telesales Services is uniquely positioned to match your company’s needs to a call center that has the experience and expertise you need to effectively process raw marketing data and turn it into sales.

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Beyond Mundane Customer Service

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on October 20, 2011

Mundane customer service and a predictable checklist mentality have decreased consumer satisfaction with customer service call centers. When interacting with representatives at customer service call centers, consumers are beginning to express the same frustration and irritation previously reserved for automated telephone response systems. In a 2010 study conducted by The Customer Contact Council, 84% of customers expressed dissatisfaction with their most recent customer service call center experience. By sticking with the same tired script format used by most customer service call centers, businesses may actually be eroding customer loyalty and provoking customer dissatisfaction.

In placing the emphasis on delivering a pre-scripted, identical message, customer service call centers have stripped the critically important “human” element from the customer service experience. Instead of actually having a conversation with customers and making a personal effort to find a solution to the individual’s problem, call center representatives stick to the company script. Rather than obtain a solution to their problem during their initial customer service contact, customers are repeatedly transferred, each time forced to re-explain their problem.

By the time the consumer receives a solution to his problem, he is so irritated by the laborious and time-consumer process involved that what should have been a positive experience (problem solution) has turned into a powerfully negative experience. The Customer Contact Council study found that 23% of customers shared a positive customer service experience with at least 10 people; but twice as many customers (48%) shared a negative customer service encounter.

Consumer disappointment with customer service call centers has led some companies to adopt new call center protocols. Rather than focusing on consumer satisfaction, call centers are earning positive consumer reviews and building customer loyalty by decreasing the amount of effort a consumer must expend to resolve a problem. Customer service representatives are being provided with greater access to consumer records and company resources and given greater latitude to resolve consumer issue on the first contact.

If you are concerned about your firms own handling of customer service calls or are simply thinking of outsourcing your customer service call center, please consider contacting us at Telesales Services. We pro-actively match businesses to quality call centers based on their capabilities and your unique needs. We can help to make sure that you are not one of the statistics mentioned in this blog post, but are instead offering exceptional customer service and phone support that will help to grow your business.

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Necessity of Call Center Outsourcing for Healthcare Companies

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on October 17, 2011

There is always a secret weapon to win a game; be it in school, personal life or professionally. If one knows this tool, then they can conveniently be an ace. This secret weapon is more in use in the corporate sectors because each company wants to be on the top in the race. The businesses want to be renowned in their field of work. Hence, they try out all the possibilities and finalize upon a particular prospect as their secret weapon. For many companies, call center has become the secret weapon. In addition to corporate houses, even healthcare organizations have given paramount importance to healthcare telemarketing. The health care companies have taken full advantage of the popular medium – call center outsourcing service for their benefits in a cost-effective manner. And many call centers for healthcare organizations have come into the limelight in order to let the healthcare services concentrate on the main aspects of the business and the core competencies.

Health care organizations considering call center outsourcing need to understand that there are many call center vendors from which to choose. And while many of them may be qualified, some are more qualified than others. You may find one that has state-of-the-art technology but is less than a state-of-the-art service provider. Or you may find exceptional call center infrastructure but the agents don’t have the appropriate skill sets.

That’s why it’s imperative to do extensive due diligence. You’ll avoid hiring a vendor that may not suit your specific needs and thereby not meet your expectations.

When researching health care call center outsourcing, it’s important to consider several factors. You’ll want to make sure that the company you go with has substantial health care industry experience. That may seem obvious on the surface. However, you’d be surprised at how many call centers out there that don’t exhibit a sure-fire understanding of the intricacies of health care.

What’s more, it’s crucial that the health care call center you entrust with your business has worked with major HMOs and pharmaceutical companies, handling their telesales, telemarketing, and inbound call center requirements using the latest call center technology.

You’ll also want to go with a call center that has a track record of success. More often than not, these will be call centers that are staffed by teleprofessionals who are more than just knowledgeable. They have practical experience to better serve your customers. For example, a call center for a pharmaceutical company might require licensed health care agents working for them as well as the call center being HIPAA compliant. These service providers will ensure that the service they provide is of the highest quality.

When you hire a qualified health care call center service provider, you can be assured of receiving world-class service along with a wealth of services that will serve you well in the long term. Surveys are a typical outsourced application. These include surveys for physicians, hospitals, and patients. They are invaluable when it comes to learning what you can do to improve your business practices.

The right health care call center will also be proficient in dealing with a wide array of programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Winback programs and retention programs are also a top priority for maintaining your customer base while top-of-the-line lead generation will expand that base exponentially.

Clinical trials and drug launches require special treatment and know-how. Experienced health care call centers can handle these sensitive topics with the utmost professionalism and confidence for the most desired results.

A few service offerings include event and class registration, patient scheduling, health plan update notifications, database updating, message management, pharmacy support, and information request handling and 24/7 availability.

The benefits to health care companies from using a qualified call center are innumerable and cannot be overstated. Overall performance will be optimized, which, in turn, will improve the all-important bottom line. An enhanced competitive and strategic position will be realized as well.

Customer acquisition efforts will result in new customers. Retention rates will improve. Labor costs will be cut. Ramp-up time will be decreased. Time to market will be decreased. Market share will be gained.

Outsourcing to a dependable call center that specializes in health care should minimize costs and maximize quality, consistency, and accountability.

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Disaster Recovery: The Outsourced Call Center Option

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on October 10, 2011

It sure would be an interesting occurrence if your client faces a disaster and needs help from your customer service representatives to guide them through the ordeal. But when they dial your number they realize that the call is answered by a back up representative who is alone on duty as your entire team is relaxing at home because of a heavy snow fall. This is a situation where disaster recovery takes a complete toss and will make you lose credibility in the market unless you decide to go ahead and outsource this function to a dedicated call center that will make sure that the client’s worries are addressed.

When disaster strikes your headquarters building may be inaccessible for an indefinite period of time. How will you provide support to your customers at such a time? This is a primary question businesses must answer when constructing a disaster recovery plan. Fortunately, there are solutions that do not require your business to invest in costly resources that may remain unused.

One such solution is outsourcing your calls to an emergency response call center. Doing so allows your business to stay in touch with customers and open for business no matter what is happening in the vicinity of your corporate offices. Businesses today are threatened by any number of situations, such as terrorism, security breaches and even the spread of contagious diseases that were not of primary concern in the past.

Today businesses are global and customers are used to having professionals available to them at all times, so any disruption of service can negatively impact your business. Traditional business plans did not address these twenty-first century problems. Uniquely modern problems call for updated solutions, such as using a call center as part of a comprehensive emergency disaster recovery plan. Calls to your business can be routed to a call center where trained, experienced professionals will put your disaster recovery response instructions into action.

When disaster strikes, your business may be overwhelmed with calls from customers and your staff may not be in a position to answer them, either because they cannot access your systems or because they cannot handle the call volume. An outsourced emergency response call center can keep adequate staff and resources on hand to support your disaster recovery plan, with infrastructure built to support just such scenarios.

Delivering the right solutions to your clients is your responsibility and in this dog eat dog world out there, your rivals will grab your business opportunities unless you have an excellent disaster recovery plan in place. A good call center will ensure that your clients’ needs are always on top priority.

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Outsourcing: The Benefits of a Customer Service Call Center

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on October 7, 2011

The power to control can be the key to winning it all. Controlling the ball is the way to win in basketball, football and in baseball. Michael Jordon would not have been the legend he is unless he knew how to control the game of basketball. Control in business means to be in command over sales, production and most importantly the costs.

In these trying financial times, control over productivity and expenses is especially important. If a business has to survive the economic crisis, they must maintain their services while cutting costs to the bone. How can this be done? Outsourcing key business elements like Customer Service is one of the answers. Instead of bearing the cost of direct employees, a business may contract with a call center and save on the added expenditure involved in paying the salaried employees of the organization.

Customer Service employees within a small and medium sized company, often have many more tasks than just taking and responding to customer calls. These employees will see these customer support calls as a disruption to their jobs and this attitude undoubtedly will reflect in their communication with a client. A call center employee is a specialist in this job and will respond to callers needs with the best demeanor. So, not only does outsourcing customer service to a call center save money, but the response from the customers often results in increased customer retention rates.

Since these specialists like their job, they reflect this content feeling onto the clients and reflect a positive vibe about the organization that employs them. Instead of hurrying the customer service call-in so they can get back to other duties, the outsourced customer service call center professional will spend the time necessary to accommodate the caller; properly handling any questions, answering any problems, directing calls to appropriate parties when they cannot handle the situation, and even taking orders.

The exercise of outsourcing the customer service requirements to a customer service call center ensures that the call center becomes an extended arm of the company. All the tasks required of a customer service department are supplied by the outsourcing agency, that service being provided by full-time customer service specialists, not part-timers who have to get back to accounting, or sales support, or other duties in the company offices.

The best of all worlds can be realized by outsourcing customer service duties to a professional call center:

• Reduced costs of the operation
• Having a specialist handle the inbound and outbound customer service calls.
• Control of how the customer service is handled, performed and budgeted.
• Streamlining the company for profitability.

There are a number of call center outsourcing companies which come highly recommended. These firms have the capability to handle and respond to queries from your marketing activities. Not only do these services aid in handling sales lead generation, appointment setting, trade show coordination and other tasks that boggle companies otherwise but they also offer an incredible benefit to any firm who wants to lead an efficient but a smart organization that takes care of its expenses while delivering profits.

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Telesales and Telemarketing Services

by Call Center Outsourcing Expert on October 5, 2011

The most important criteria in doing good business is by getting great sales that result in tremendous profits. In today’s highly competitive world, reaching out to more people is essential and the only way in which one can maximize reach to one’s clients is by utilizing the power of telesales and telemarketing. Involving your own firm in handling the outbound and inbound call services will prove to be a really tedious solution and the ideal solution to this can be achieved by outsourcing this job to a dependable call center firm that can take this task on their hand and aid you in delivering optimal efficiency.

Using a call center makes sense if you have regular telemarketing as part of your sales effort or if you are starting up a telesales initiative. A professional call center will represent your company as if they were working within your company. They have state-of-the-art technology and the latest reporting and testing capabilities for market research if required. You will be able to get your new campaign rolling more quickly and reach more qualified leads. Your phone use will become maximized while costs per sale are reduced through modern technology. Feedback is just as easy as if you were conducting calls from your own office but you will have data from many more calls.

Getting qualified leads to new customers is the best way to launch a new campaign and generate sales. It is like using a bigger net when fishing; you will haul in a larger catch. Test marketing can be conducted more quickly and as you generate more sales from test results your market share will also increase. Calls can be done locally, regionally or nationally as required.

Experience always counts when you are doing telesales and telemarketing. Rather than having your staff learn on the job you can use the skilled and trained teleprofessionals at the call center to jump start your initiative. They are experienced with programs that are similar to yours and are able to respond faster to market conditions. Their expertise is also helpful in retaining the current customers on your lists. By outsourcing the tedious task of telemarketing you and your staff can focus on the things you do best.

Telemarketing is not an easy job to do. Many people find they are not suited for it and do not enjoy making phone calls to strangers. A trained telemarketing staff can make all the difference in campaign success in addition to broadening and speeding up sales. A call center is equipped to handle all size jobs from small test programs to the large campaigns of Fortune 500 companies. Finding the right call center for your job is just the beginning. Once successfully matched with a company your campaign can be implemented quickly to meet your specific requirements.

Getting a call center service to work for you and deliver excellent profits through telemarketing and telesales services is a fantastic idea to increase your efficiency and not take up an extra load of work for your employees and your organization.

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Customers Value the Human Touch

by Bill Samuels on May 18, 2011

In last week’s blog post, I shared one of the key takeaways from American Express’s Global Customer Service Barometer survey: People Spend More Money with Companies That Provide Excellent Customer Service. Here’s another interesting data point, one with particular relevance to people involved with their organizations’ call center operations:

The survey clearly shows that customers equate superior customer service with live interactions with an organization’s representatives.

Fully 90% of respondents indicated that they preferred to deal with an actual person as opposed to other methods of interacting with a company. People are definitely becoming more receptive to using company websites (half said that online chat was acceptable) and social media channels, but they much prefer personal interaction with a live representative. Which method came in lowest? Only 20% of the survey’s respondents said they were interested in using an automated phone response system.

But here’s the paradox:

As I pointed out last week, 60% of survey respondents believe that companies haven’t devoted more attention to customer service, and 25% of that group feel that companies have actually decreased their attention to customer service.

What’s the impact of poor customer service? Fully 78% of American consumers have dropped a purchase mid-stream upon encountering poor customer service. And 59% say they would switch to a different company for better customer service.

In difficult economic climates, many organizations view call center operations as an area where they can trim their budgets. I believe that’s a mistake. Your call center represents a golden opportunity to provide better customer service than your competition, thereby differentiating your organization in a meaningful, bottom-line-results way.

So when others are cutting costs, take the more profitable route and take proactive steps to ensure that your call center is providing the best possible customer experience. If you’re outsourcing your call center requirements, or thinking about doing so, make sure you’re working with a resource whose agents can represent your brand professionally and courteously.

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People Spend More Money with Companies That Provide Excellent Customer Service

by Bill Samuels on May 10, 2011

I was very interested to read the just-released results from the Global Customer Service Barometer survey of 1,018 consumers conducted by American Express in February of this year. The survey has many excellent takeaways that should be of interest to anyone involved in customer service, and I encourage you to read it for yourself. I’ll take a look at more of the results in future blog posts, but I want to draw your attention now to one of the survey’s more significant findings:

70% of Americans are willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service. This is a significant difference from 2010, when 58% of respondents said that they’d spend an average of 9% more at companies providing great service.

But when they were asked whether companies are paying more or less attention to customer service, 60% of respondents believe that businesses haven’t devoted more attention to customer service. And within that group, 26% say that companies have actually decreased their focus on customer service.

Talk about a disconnect!

Here we have evidence that people will spend more money when they experience high-quality service. Yet companies seem to be standing pat or even decreasing their focus on providing quality service (at least in the eyes of customers, but they are the ones who really count, after all).

In the words of Jim Bush, Amex’s Executive Vice President, World Service, “Getting service right is more than just a nice to do; it’s a must do. American consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide outstanding service, and they will also tell, on average, twice as many people about bad service than they will about good service. Ultimately, great service can drive sales and customer loyalty.”

The message is clear: Don’t view your call center as a cost center. Instead, conceive of it as an opportunity center and act accordingly. Providing excellent customer service can boost your bottom line and differentiate you from the competition.

If you’re outsourcing your inbound or outbound call center requirements, make sure you’re working with a high-quality operation staffed by well-trained agents who are committed to providing top-tier service.

Your brand deserves no less.

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Recognizing Influential Customers

by Bill Samuels on March 2, 2011

A few days ago, the New York Times profiled a woman named Heather Armstrong, one of the original “mommy bloggers,” and still one of the most influential. So influential, in fact, that Forbes has her at No. 6 on its latest Most Influential Women in Media list. That she drives opinions goes without saying. Of course, she also drives sales. Lots of sales.

The Times piece opens with a description of Heather’s experience in 2009 with the Maytag customer service representative who treated her dismissively during a phone call about her brand new washer, which had ceased functioning one week after it was installed. With a brand new baby, stressed and at the end of her rope, after multiple unsuccessful repair attempts, and not getting anywhere with the rep, Heather mentioned that she had a million followers on Twitter and asked if that would make any difference.

The rep responded: “Yes, I know what Twitter is. And no, that will not matter.”

After asking for a supervisor and not getting anywhere there, either, Heather turned to Twitter.

And in short order Maytag found itself on the brink of a very bad PR situation. A social media brushfire was threatening to turn into a full-fledged firestorm. Fortunately, a Maytag executive suite staffer caught wind of the issue almost immediately and dispatched a top-notch repairman who was able to successfully get Heather’s machine up and running properly.

What lessons can a company and its customer service executives draw from this tale?

Several, actually, but foremost among them is the realization that what transpires between a rep and a customer during a one-on-one interaction can quickly become public. Consumers now have multiple channels to relay their experiences, good and bad, with companies. And if a particular customer has a large following, there can be repercussions.

Obviously, proper training can go a long way toward handling tricky situations and even avoiding them in the first place. And new technologies, only on the horizon now, will help as well.

In the future, social media channels will become increasingly integrated into the CRM environment. It will then be possible for organizations to garner important information about current and potential customers, including how influential they might be, as they’re interacting with them. Organizations will be able to use that information to help them tailor responses, in near real-time, to particular customers’ specific circumstances.

Klout is one service that’s starting to draw some attention. Using proprietary algorithms, Klout provides an influence score for just about anyone on Twitter and Facebook. Already there are stories about organizations providing extra perks and higher levels of service to consumers with high Klout scores.

It’s debatable whether a single score will have relevance across multiple industries. But as the influence-measuring market matures, we can be sure that more sophisticated, industry-specific measuring models will be developed.

These are very early days, but looking to the future, when you’re thinking of outsourcing your contact center requirements, a vendor’s social media and influence-measuring capabilities might well be part of your consideration set.

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