What is Telemarketing and
Telesales?
Telesales
is really the granddaddy of the industry and used to operate as a
completely independent entity. However, as the industry has grown and
the disciplines of Telemarketing have developed and emerged, Telesales
itself has become encompassed as a discipline within the umbrella term
of Telemarketing.
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So what
do I want? Telemarketing or Telesales?
Well, as
the name Telesales indicates, this activity is primarily involved with
directly taking orders for products or services over the telephone in
either an inbound or an outbound environment. Telemarketing covers
everything else; disciplines within Telemarketing include Appointment
Setting, Lead Generation, Database Verification, Market Research,
Mystery Shopper Campaigns, List Cleaning, Consumer Helplines, Seminar
and Other Event Building, DRTV Response (sometimes
linked with Telesales) and Courtesy Calls for Relationship Building
Exercises.
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What's the difference between
Inbound and Outbound Telemarketing?
Inbound Telemarketing refers to calls, made by
either businesses or consumers, that are dialed in to a team of
communicators waiting to receive the calls. Outbound is the opposite,
where the communicators will dial out to reach consumers and businesses.
You will tend to find that most agencies specialise in either Inbound or
Outbound, very few try to do both.
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Why do companies specialise in
Inbound and Outbound?
There are a number of very good reasons for this, the first
is that the skill set needed to operate an Inbound call centre is
different to that of an Outbound communicator. It is often said that an
Outbound communicator can easily handle Inbound, but an Inbound operator
can't professionally make outgoing calls. For this reason much more
emphasis on the development, training and supervision of the Outbound
communicator is necessary, at a cost that some companies do not wish to
pay or are unable to bear the investment. Inbound communication is often
linked with ACD systems and enables
technology to be used much more, the calls are simpler and thus direct
data capture into a database can be used, often the complexity of an
Outbound call limits this application. Some companies have even gone
beyond this step and now have no live operators answering Inbound calls,
all call handling is done by a computer.
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What is an ACD
System?
An ACD system
receives the Inbound call and routes the call to the next available
operator speeding up the response time to the call and maintaining
communicator efficiency. Sometimes these systems are linked to a
predictive dialer which (with computerised agencies) are able to dial
automatically and then route the call when answered to the next
available operator.
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Can
Stormark do this?
Stormark believe in a different principle, we are a
specialist Outbound Agency utilising the very best
communicators with the very best training. We believe in the importance
of live operators having natural and fluent conversations with the
prospects that they call, which are often your potential customers, and
as such we do not link our communicators to computer screens. This we
believe raises the quality of the contact and enables our communicators
to feel much more comfortable with their roles, eliminating robotic and
repetitive dialogue and instead stimulates long term interest and
employee retention.
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So you can't do
Inbound?
Well yes we
do, but we don't handle large scale projects. We believe that a
specialist should do specialist roles - and Inbound and Outbound
Telemarketing are both specialist roles. We will do some small Inbound
work for our clients if it is of a manageable size to ensure that they
get the quality and calls are not lost; we do not have the capacity for
DRTV.
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What is
DRTV?
DRTV stands for
Direct Response Television, it is estimated now that over 30% of TV ad's
now carry some form of response mechanism i.e. Call this number now,
call to find out more etc. This generates very large volumes of calls
often in very small periods of time.
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What are your hours
of opening?
Our
normal hours of opening are Monday to Thursday 08.30 to 17.30 and Friday
08.30 to 16.30. We do often work in the evenings up until 21.00 and also
on Saturdays. We have however worked Sundays and manned the phone rooms
24 hours a day for clients projects in the past and don't mind doing it
again.
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Do you call
Internationally?
Yes,
we have French, Italian and German speakers resident as permanent staff
members within Stormark, we have also been asked to supply other
languages in the past and will explore the local resources if you
require.
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Do you work on
a commission basis?
Working on a commission basis would mean that we would have
to also pay our staff on commission and that would do two things,
firstly it would place our staff under unnecessary pressure in an
already stressful role, and secondly, our communicators would be more
forceful over the phone and perhaps gain the objective without it being
properly qualified. For these reasons we will not work on a commission
basis.
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What
other services apart from Outbound Telemarketing do you provide?
We do also provide
Telemarketing Skills Training and Consultancy
services to the general marketplace, each of these areas accounts for
approximately 5% of Stormark's turnover.
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What type of
Training courses do you provide?
We provide training on all aspects of Telemarketing skills
including Inbound, Outbound, Telesales and Telephone Courtesy. All of
our courses run from an introductory level through to advanced and all
courses are tailored to a specific client's needs, enabling us to match
the delegates' needs and the clients requirements specifically with the
training material.
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What type of
Consultancy do you do?
Primarily our Consultancy services lie in the development of
client call centres, recruitment, training and development and
assessment of existing facilities.
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Who or what is the
DMA?
The Direct Marketing
Association is the core trade association in direct marketing and was
set up in 1992. It is now the point of reference, expertise and advice
for political institutions in Europe and Westminster, opinion formers,
media, consumers and for the communications industry as a
whole.
The mission of the DMA is to represent the best
interests of members by raising the stature of the Direct Marketing
Industry and giving the consumer trust and confidence in Direct
Marketing. The DMA believes that the key to success lies in a company's
relationship with it's customers.
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What is Telephone Preference Service
(TPS)?
Telephone Preference
Service is a Consumer Protection Scheme launched in 1995 - consumers who
do not wish to receive unsolicited telephone sales and marketing calls
may register their telephone number with the TPS.
It was created
by the DMA together with the Glass & Glazing Federation (GGF), the
Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers (ICFM), the Periodical
Publishers Association (PPA), BT and Mercury. It is funded by BT and
Mercury, and supported by the Office of Telecommunications and the Data
Protection Registrar.
