Electronic Retailer - December 2011 - 42

BY SCOTT RICHARDS

Listening to Your Customers is Sound Business
CHANNEL CROSSING: TELESERVICES
Marketers know that direct marketing programs come in an assortment of flavors. At one end of the spectrum is the wildly successful, lightening-in-a-bottle variety. At the other is the abject failure of the single-digit media efficiency ratio (MER). But the truth is, most programs lie somewhere in between. From offer to media to telemarketing – each facet of a campaign requires careful tending to turn an also-ran into a bona fide winner. Yet direct marketers have a unique challenge – they operate largely in a vacuum, relying mostly on intuition to select winning products. They broadcast their offerings on TV and the internet and hope for the best. And while loads of data help separate winners from losers, marketers lack the ability to look their customers in the eye to understand why the latter may or may not be buying. In the absence of this face-to-face interaction, there is a simple solution that can be used to optimize such campaigns and unlock the truth about how consumers feel and it is this: call recording. Here’s how call recording works. When consumers respond to an offer, they hear a message that says, “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” When all inbound calls are recorded, marketers can then filter calls by variables such as the length of the call, location and whether the inquirers purchased or not. Then, by simply listening to the calls, marketers can glean invaluable insight that will help them optimize their campaign. Call recording is easy to execute, yet very few marketers take advantage of it. It offers enormous benefits that savvy direct marketers would be wise to consider, including: • Call recording is a cost-effective alternative to traditional focus group research. Just two focus groups with 20 total participants can cost between $20,000 and $30,000, and the format has severe limitations. For a fraction of the cost, measured in hundreds of dollars versus thousands, a marketer can gain both invaluable quantitative and qualitative insight. • Call recording research is measured against real buyers and genuine potential buyers. Focus group participants are typically screened by gender, income and whether they buy from TV and online. When you conduct research against actual respondents, you’re compiling data from folks interested enough in your product to either raise their hand or buy. • Unlike focus group research, call recording research is statistically valid. Traditional focus group research can glean good qualitative insight against variables such as price resistance or the effectiveness of messaging, but the costs associated with it restrict the number of participants to the point where the data, while anecdotal, is statistically invalid. According to statisticians, a sample size of 20 has a margin of error of 22.4 percent. Increase that number to 200 via call recording, and you reduce the margin of error to 7.1 percent. • Call recording is an easy way to ferret out objections. Why aren’t people buying? Is there some lingering question that has been left unanswered by the advertising? These kinds of questions can be answered by listening to your qualified prospects and buyers. • Call recording helps optimize messaging and telemarketing scripting. Once you have listened to calls and determined the reasons why people aren’t buying, you can tweak your creative, messaging, offer and telemarketing script to proactively address any success barriers. • Call recording can help you better train your sales agents. Call recording will let you hear just how your calls are being handled. If you use multiple call centers, you can determine who is doing the best job with your inbound traffic and, using intelligent call routing, divert more calls to the top performing center. In addition, you can reward your best agents and use them as role models and trainers to strengthen your total telesales effort. • Call recording can help you determine who your customer really is. Most marketers think they know who their customer is, but in today’s nuanced marketplace, call recording can help you profile who your buyer really is. You can segment your buyers and refine messages that are relevant to distinct silos of consumers. An intelligent, properly trained employee can easily begin the process of listening to calls and then create an insight grid they populate with findings from a larger cadre of calls. This information can then be put to practical use to refine a campaign’s winning formula. The end result will not only speak volumes, it will likely add volume to your bottom line. Scott Richards is CEO of Dial800, specialists in marketing optimization. Dial 800’s tool suite includes RapidRecall, the industry’s largest bank of numerically memorable 800 numbers and AccuRoute, state-of-theart intelligent call routing, tracking and recording. He can be reached at 1-800-DIAL-800 or at scott.richards@Dial800.com.

electronicRETAILER | December 2011

Electronic Retailer - December 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronic Retailer - December 2011