Lead generation teams of call centers can make use of contests to expand their popularity. Contests bring about a buzz about the brand. Users in the network participate because of the prizes, the discounts and the freebies. They also bring in their friends and acquaintances because they are excited about the contest. This is the ideal opportunity for the call center to get some quality leads in the bag. The outbound call center department can make the participants fill out a form that records their names, phone numbers and locations. The data can be used for sales lead generation calls in the future.
Contests also help the lead generation team speak about their brand’s products and services. The contest must closely resemble the brand itself. For example, if you’re selling a health drink, you can arrange for an adventurous contest. The ideal platform for the call centers to conduct contests is the social media network, especially Facebook. Create an event page and make the users interact with each other. This initiative will enrich your database and you will be able to reach out your product or service to a completely new and fresh set of consumers.
Call center units across the globe are exploring the social media networks. In our earlier posts on this blog, we had reported how BPO units are dealing with social media networks. We have always maintained that the route to social media nirvana is interaction and user participation. But call centers engaging in these campaigns have it hard to bring about those interactions. The moment users find out that your profile has been designed with marketing as the main aim, they tend to stay away unless they are serious customers. The lead generation team has to think out something special and out of the box to clinch it.
An effective way to do that for a call center would be to offer freebies and discounts to users to participate in social media discussions. You can get them to comment and reward the best one with an additional 5% rebate on the cost price. These methods will get more people into your network. The BPO will find that the existing users will be tempted to bring in their cronies into your profile. Very few can resist something for nothing! That is the marketing mantra that sales lead generation teams can build up on.
The problem faced by the customer service department is a two-sided coin. On one side is the perspective of the customers. The callers who dial up the inbound call center number don’t have the time to wait for a call center agent to answer their call. That is truer for potential customers. We have noted in various surveys that among the callers who do not get the response immediately, 40% do not come back after they leave.
In other words, the BPO unit loses that much of revenue. In times like these, that amounts to a considerable sum of money on a daily basis. As we have reported in earlier posts, longer hold times also complicate the issue.
The other side of the coin is from the call center’s point of view. The inbound call center department is often flooded with calls from bogus callers. The BPO call protection software is not always able to keep these calls away. They take up the bandwidth on the incoming calls and bona fide callers cannot get through. These callers also increase the hold time on the calls. To put is simply, the call centers have to screen these callers more effectively. They are great hindrances to optimization and better utilization of resources.
Photo Credit:© Sven Hagolani/Corbis
Local employees can add value to the BPO. The only hitch in this equation is that many call centers cannot take in local talent because the talent pool is not rich. It could be that the standard of skills is inferior or the locals are not really keyed into the different world of telemarketing services. More than the soft skills, what a call center agent needs is the attitude. You need the desire to learn and grow as an individual and also contribute to the growth of the company they are working in. Local talent has a lot of advantages over getting someone from other cities.
First, the local person would not add much to the expenditure side of the call center ledger. Second, because the person has not worked in any BPO before, you can train the employee according to the need of the project. Telemarketing projects are entirely different from each other. A fresh mind will be able to pick up the nuances of the project better than someone who’s already been trained in a patchy way. Third, by looking into the local talent pool, you will be able to pick and choose the kind of talent you want for your call center.
Photo Credit:Karen Kasmauski/Corbis
