Tele-Marketing With High Ethical Standards

As a followup to the previous post, I’m about to make some suggestions on what I think companies should do to avoid irritating potential customers. Most of it will seem pretty obvious, but many a times, we see companies making obvious mistakes. Probably what’s obvious to some may not be obvious to others or probably the fact that something is too obvious makes a company oblivious to it. Without beating around the bush, let’s dive straight into the suggestions.

Ascertain the source of your leads
It’s very common for companies to purchase contacts from other agencies and cold call such customers nowadays. However, these leads are probably not fresh due to the fact that they have been sold to many other companies before. By blindly purchasing leads from all over the place, your cold calls may end up being one of the 1,000 nuisance calls that the other party receives. Therefore, if leads have to be purchased, it’s suggested that:

• Source of the lead is not dubious and Date of receiving the lead is recent. 
• Only fresh leads are purchased and ensured that they will not be resold to more than 2 or 3 companies.
• Before keying the lead into the company’s followup system, it may be important for the leads to be verified by having an initial cold call carried out and ensure that the potential customer will not feel that his privacy is invaded. In short, be transparent.

Ensure the professionalism of your telemarketers
Telemarketers are usually paid a certain amount of remuneration if they perform well, but they are not concerned about bringing a bad reputation to the company. They do not get anything for serving the company in such areas as addressing the complain of the other party and will probably be unmotivated to do anything. I suggest that telemarketers should be trained to be professional in all aspects of the telephone conversation and not just selling. Their rewards should also be tied to complains that they resolve, since this will likely bring upon goodwill to the company.

For example, the phone calls that have been looking for Mr Soh has been really irritating and the attitude I have received for being nice is totally ridiculous. However, once every so often, I will face a professional telemarketer that apologizes in a professional manner and offers to help me remove the contact before I suggest it. Additionally, his/ her followup response does not end there, but follows up nicely with a not-so-typical “Yeah, I got the wrong number, but maybe you will be interested in so-and-so”

I think that such telemarketers acted very professionally in the face of a special situation. I especially like the fact of reassurance at the end of the conversation that the contact will be deleted from their database, since it did not address me correctly. Such professionalism made me continue to listen to the unsolicited offer, despite addressing me incorrectly when they called, so I would say that this professionalism and sincerity are very important qualities in service staff.

Assessing the Professionalism of your staff
Besides adequately training your staff and providing rewards for complain resolution, it may also be important to assess your staff differently. For example, I propose that you add the contact number of someone you know into the call list (with his/ her permission of course). Get this specific person to play the role of either a normal customer or someone complaining about something. After your staff calls, he/ she will be relate his/ her experience to you. If mystery shoppers work, this may work just as well on a telemarketing perspective.

If this practice becomes common among all companies, telemarketers have no choice but to act professionally every time. Who knows, someone important may be at the other side of the conversation and their rewards may just be pegged to this conversation. With that, I would like to end this post and open up the comments board.

What do you think of the above approach and what other ideas do you have to improve the standard of telemarketing in Singapore? Feel free to share your ideas.