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Telemarketing was revolutionized in the '80s with the introduction of predictive dialers, which automatically dial numbers, screen out busy signals, no answers, answering machines, and disconnects. The technology has continued to improve, offering enormous gains in productivity.
But Mark Ambrose, executive director Global Fulfillment Strategies for Citicorp, in New York, stresses that outbound sales efforts, which he views as part of proactive servicing, should not be divorced from overall relationship management.
"Banks have a unique opportunity to use outbound as a meaningful event, because they have a great deal of financial information about the customer and because they still have the credibility to hold the customer's attention, But it's a matter of trust. If you contact customers out of the blue, and there's no context, chances are they will think something is wrong." That is a rather "thin veneer," he says, which wears out with multiple approaches.
"If banks don't build on the opportunity to create a value proposition, and that involves knowing the individual customer, they'll lose. What one person thinks is intrusive, another thinks is useful. Where one person prefers to get Post-Its on the Internet, another prefers to be called only between certain hours. Proactive servicing is all context-driven, and the context of the individual is defined by the customer." "Anybody can deliver a lot of outbound dials," says Mick Bates of EIS, "but the real trick is how you can generate outbound dials such that you're minimizing the abandoned calls or 'nuisance calls.' We're getting well below 5 percent." Reducing nuisance calls is particularly important because of growing public demands for stricter control of telemarketers.
Allan Geller, president of Visions Marketing Services, based in Lancaster, PA, says the dialer they use makes 150 calls per hour per agent, delivering 18-to20 live connects. The system is calibrated to send an agent his next call 10 seconds after "term-out."