Do not call register’s impact on telemarketing industry
Posted by MattE on 08 May 2007 at 09:56 am | Tagged as: Marketing
The opening of the Australian do-not-call-register has been welcomed with warm enthusiasm - certainly by me and the other 250,000 people who registered on the first DAY.
There are a number of countries around the world with similar registers - so this begs the question - What effect will this registry have on telemarketers, especially those we have all come to dislike - high pressure callers from overseas call centres?
It is quite timely then that this very topic was recently addressed by David Foulcher (regional director, Cincom India) who wrote a pice in the Indian newspaper, the Financial Express. The first part of the article is repeated here:
Will do-not-call list impact the tele-marketing industry?
Calls will now become more relevant and service oriented
Yes and no. The tele-marketing industry will be affected because the customer’s privacy concerns are being given the importance it deserves. This will push organisations’ cross-selling, up-selling and those that make cold calls to consumers to resort to contextual marketing and sophisticated modeling and analytical tools to give the consumer the right product at the right time.
This will also ensure that the tele-marketing agent will be compelled to take on the role of a more frequently engaging concerned service provider and not just a commission-hungry aggressive (and sometimes insensitive) salesperson.
So now, what will happen is that most calls that will need to be initiated to the customer will have to be a service call. What essentially this means is that the caller will need to update or discuss an issue that a customer is already facing. Only on the successful resolution of the same will the customer give him time to push the callers’ agenda further.
This is significant as, especially in a country like India, a prospect is hounded till he/she gives the tele-marketing organisation business but the same organisation becomes incommunicado when the customer has a service query…
…While the telemarketing business may see a cut in job intakes, it would also mean a higher level of fulfillment to telemarketing executives who would now take on roles of relationship managers.
Update - today10 May my office phone and mobile phone have been seriously ringing…..all telemarketers. Seems they are keen to make to most of their opportunity before the legislation kick in at the end of this month.
Do you have comments or thoughts on this - let us know.
