Telemarketing Quality Assurance
By: Mark Swanson
In the telemarketing services industry everything revolves around conversion rate, SPH or sales per hour (for those new to this concept think miles per hour as in your car and apply it to this scenario…and the higher the better in this case), or Leads, essentially, telemarketing is very results driven. Telemarketing Service centers are all too familiar with the SPH and they work constantly to reach those goals for each of their clients. Other clients are worried more about conversion rates for a campaign and telemarketing service providers are forced to try and convert faster. More often than not a Telemarketing service provider may push too hard for these goals and it may result in sales that are generated but customers that had no intention of buying, paying, or they have high drop out rates. Even worse, this can significantly reduce the effects of an outbound telemarketing lead generation campaign where follow-ups on these leads have and a drastic impact on the morality of sales agents.
Quality Assurance departments are often underappreciated in the telemarketing services plan; however, savvy telemarketing services expert plan diligently to ensure that the quality assurance department plays an active role in the outbound telemarketing services program. Quality assurance is often considered as avenues to simple assure that agents are not abusing customers on the phone. Often this can be looked at as a costly overhead and is the first area telemarketing service clients will trim back when looking at saving costs in the outbound telemarketing program. Cutting back on these services can actually cost the program in the end.
Top 5 ways Quality Assurance can save money
-
Telemarketing Sales Accuracy
Telemarketing services as mentioned before is bound to generate some sales that do not go through and buyer’s remorse is part of the process. However, when pushed, some telemarketing service providers will push through sales. These pushes can cost telemarketing service customers a significant amount of money through dropouts or non orders. Quality Assurance agents at reputable telemarketing services agencies can verify sales for accuracy and ensure the quality of leads and sales created by telemarketing services agencies.
-
Telemarketing Sales and Leads Quality
Quality assurance is also given the enormous task of ensuring that agents not only follow the call flow but that they also give all of the sales efforts needed to insure a higher conversion rate. For example, 2/3 of all sales are made after the first rebuttal is given. If a telemarketing services provider is dialing a program at a 1.00 SPH (sales per hour) and 5 agents are dialing 8 hour shifts. The client is expecting to receive 40 sales each day. If one of the agents is not giving a rebuttal on every call than that is 5.28 sales lost on a daily basis. Quality assurance can catch these errors and assure that they effort is being made to create each sale.
-
Telemarketing Script Deficiencies
Scripting or lack there of is a huge concern when working with any outbound telemarketing services provider. Even the best script can generate a regular response from prospects. A high quality telemarketing services provider will spend a great deal of time working with quality assurance to quantify regular responses in a script.
-
Branding Purposes
The haunting idea behind the new telemarketing industry arena is the idea of a telemarketing image hurting a telemarketing client’s image is a serious concern. Customer service oriented telemarketing efforts and well designed quality assurance programs can significantly improve the overall effect of the telemarketing image and the success of a telemarketing campaign. Ensuring that friendly and effective agents can no only improve results and increase sales, but it can also create repeat buyers for return calls. Quality assurance can ensure that agents are working within these parameters and can significantly improve the image as a company. Remember, Telemarketing agents can often be the only personal communication between a company and its customers.
-
Quantitative Telemarketing Testing
Telemarketing is in many ways a umbers game, and Quality assurance can be no different. Developing a quantitative scoring system for agents can ensure that telemarketing clients are not only getting their branding message across, but that they are also getting agents that are scoring high enough to ensure sales success. Quantitative QA efforts are essentially for increasing the sales presentation and the branding focus. It can additionally be used to test script variations and agent training. Measuring the effectiveness of a Quality Assurance department can be vital to improving the overall results of a telemarketing campaign.
There really are thousands of reasons to improve the intricate relationship between quality assurance and the telemarketing sales agents. However, the QA process I handled at the outsourced telemarketing center, it is important for telemarketing clients to maintain an active role in its development and ongoing improvement.