Telemarketing company tip: add email to contact strategy

By Rich Hamilton, Director of Marketing & Product Development

Any salesperson will tell you that it takes multiple touch points to book a sale. Depending on the industry and the type of product or service, it can take 7 to 20 touches before a prospect will buy from your company. As a B2B outbound telemarketing company, we experience this in our daily work for our clients.

Imagine if each of those touch points were a phone call, the sales cycle would take forever. Adding email as a touch point can drastically decrease the sales cycle. Here are 6 best practices for adding email as an additional touch point as part of your overall marketing and sales strategy. Continue reading →

Ensure a 5 Star Inbound Call Center Outsourcing Experience

By Melissa Werth, Customer Service Supervisor

Author note: When I use the term inbound calls, I am also referring to other customer contacts like text, chat, and email. In today’s inbound customer service model, all of these customer contact types are viewed interchangeably.

You’ve made the decision to employ inbound call center outsourcing to save money, improve service or both. Inbound call center selection is not easy. There are lots of call center options. And after you’ve made the decision, you need to be prepared to make a heavy investment of time with the new team to ensure they are successful. Many executives and managers overlook the importance of the time investment when they are developing the plan.

To ensure your outsource initiative is successful, here are some keys to ensure success. Continue reading →

Successful Outsource Telemarketing Using Call Blending

By Marcia Jenkins, Senior Operations Manager

One of the best tools an outsource telemarketing or contact center manager has is the blended seat. A blended seat is a call center workstation that allows the call center agent to handle inbound calls, outbound calls, email, chats and text messages. Most call center management pros are adept at carefully constructing a plan where different call center agents are “skilled” for different types of contacts and by using skills and skills-based routing, the call center agents are kept busy with the contact types that they are most skilled at; however they are also available to handle non-primary contact types as needed to achieve the service level and customer satisfaction goals within the call center. Continue reading →

Membership Renewals: How to Combat Procrastination

By Nathan Teahon, Vice President

Procrastination is a funny thing, but not something that is typically described as being “ha ha” funny. It’s definitely not funny for associations that deal with members that procrastinate renewing their memberships. The biggest question for associations is why is there an issue with procrastination for their membership renewals, and why using telemarketing services for membership renewals is the best way to combat this issue. Below are some of the top reasons that members procrastinate with their membership renewals.

Membership Renewals Timing

Sometimes bad timing just works against you. Every company has their own budget cycle and time of the year that they get accustomed to paying certain dues. Also, the timing can be an issue when a person leaves a company and is replaced. Things fall through the cracks and this is often one of those things. What makes this scenario more frustrating is that reminder emails and potentially invoices continue to go to someone that is no longer with the company. Eventually in these scenarios they might end up getting to the appropriate person, but often this can become a black hole scenario. Continue reading →

3 Reasons to Use the Text Channel in the Call Center

By A.J. Windle, Director of Operations

Text Channel in the Call Center Cell phones. These magical handheld computers have come a long way since the days of vehicle bag phones. We’re now a mobile society with over 90% of Americans now owning a cell phone. It boggles my mind that more businesses are not utilizing texting in their call center. The primary opportunity is to text enable your company’s main business number, your customer service phone number, and your customer service and sales team’s DIDs.

Here at QCS we have taken a proactive approach to increasing outbound call program response rates and inbound customer service satisfaction by adding text communication to the mix. Continue reading →