Telemarketing Outsourcing

If you have a new product which is launched or which is yet to be launched, Internet Marketing is one way of promoting your product. With the possibility of low ROI due to Internet Marketing, a lot of these companies do telemarketing of their products. In Telemarketing, the company appoints a set of employees who will be the marketing interface for their product to customers. Almost on the lines of customer service outsourcing, telemarketing outsourcing involves the companies outsourcing the telemarketing function overseas.

Though, the supply chain of telemarketing outsourcing sounds simple, in reality it is not that way. It may sound like "You know the product, advertise it" phrase, but 3rd party companies who provide telemarketing services are well aware of challenges presented to them. With telemarketing crossing all boundaries to provide Business-to-Business marketing and Business-to-customer Marketing, telemarketing outsourcing cuts costs for sure, but it does come with its own caveats.

Here is a brief look at the services provided in the telemarketing domain:

  • Lead Generation - This involves the telemarketers collecting information of people/business who can be possible prospects to buy their products.

  • Sales - This involves selling of the product to the customers. In all eventualities, the telemarketers know the product by studying the product brochure. In case of telemarketing outsourcing, the telemarketers are provided with a product training of the product to ensure all product-related knowledge gaps are covered.

  • Outbound Telemarketing - This involves Telemarketers calling up prospective customers and marketing the product. The calling database is either setup by the Lead Generation mechanism or by purchasing a calling list database.

  • Inbound Telemarketing - This involves telemarketers attending to incoming phone calls from customers regarding product queries and product information.

Telemarketing domain has come under plenty of legal and regulatory controls. With the Consumer Privacy and Protection act, it has become a complex and not-too-easy task of calling up a person. With the fact that lots of scams and frauds have been detected to telemarketing, makes companies apprehensive of outsourcing this function. Coupled with the fact that if they outsource the function to a country like India you may not get a workforce which speaks native English. Relatively poor Sales rates averaging around 6-7% of the contacts have forced the 3rd party service providers to look at telemarketing from a different perspective. That is the reason why lot of these providers are looking to training their workforce in Voice and Accent, just so that an American feels he is talking to an American.

With companies having to restructure quality and process management for them to outsource telemarketing and 3rd party service providers investing heavily in training, telemarketing outsourcing is not an easy task. But it is worth taking a bet on it, as it cuts down your marketing costs by a good 40%.