Telemarketing has seen better days about four decades ago.
Foreword
Welcome to the Weekly Business Learnings series!
These days it is hard to get good service from businesses we encounter as we go about our daily lives.
This has inspired us to analyse each unique situation and share our insights so you and your business can benefit from these case studies or perhaps find out what you can do next if you happen to be working for a "toxic company" or know someone who is.
Telemarketing was popular in the seventies. At present day, it has died out in most developed countries.
Singapore is a peculiar one where banking, financial institutions and even some consumer goods companies have failed to move on and still use telemarketing as a method to sell their products.
Telemarketing companies claim they increase sales for companies by reaching the right customers but how clean is their database and how efficient are their telemarketers?
It is unfortunately an industry filled with young and inexperienced or uneducated workers with little to no work experience or grasp of the English language who then proceed to cold call individuals who are more than likely to get annoyed than sign up for something.
Many a time, it is not surprising that people just politely decline, hang up and block the nuisance number.
Several websites have even sprung up to host popular telesales or "spam/ scam call" numbers that are shared among groups of people so you know who to put on the telephone block list.
Is telemarketing even relevant anymore?
Telemarketing existed when it was inconvenient to purchase things from stores - long drives and the inability to purchase items online - when catalogs were fashionable.
Telemarketing is dead as it is simply not needed anymore.
Telesales is as efficient or equivalent to people distributing physical copies of flyers on the street and roadshows where strangers or salespeople attempt to sell a product or service to as many people that they can in a short period of time. When companies value quantity over quality, this usually results in a lower conversion rate which has a direct impact on sales revenue.
Why is telemarketing irrelevant?
From Amazon to any airline company, a customer service hotline call is now handled by a handful of countries in Asia - India, Philippines or Hong Kong.
These people have poor language abilities and are given no power or control to help customers hence automated e-mail responses or recordings could easily replace 90% of phone calls.
Using telemarketing for a sales and marketing on the other hand, is a totally different issue.
Relationships matter and calling someone with a topic that usually has no interest to the person does not help at all. Most times, telemarketing contact lists are usually outdated with poorly sourced database.
The telemarketer is "trained" to read from a script so much so that an electronic survey could takeover their job more efficiently.
People are time-starved and do not want to spend 5 not to mention 20 minutes over the phone being sold a financial service or product that do not want.
The solution to telemarketing's demise
With big data and artificial intelligence no longer a stranger and plenty of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), lead management and analytics tools, it has never been easier to gather and qualify leads.
Most importantly, the ability to analyse huge amounts of lead data, behavioural analytics and make sense of what to do with it before starting a digital marketing campaign would be pivotal to the success of any brand's aspirations.
Talk to us today if you want to take a step and transition from telemarketing of the yesteryears, to a more effective audience targeting, lead generation and marketing retention strategy.