Ringing in a new medium

The telephone became the third largest advertising medium in the USA, passing up direct mail around 1984, to take its place in the big three with television and newspapers. In 1985, the number of people involved in tele-marketing in the US had grown to 300,000. Rapp and Collins, the illustrious authors of the marketing mega-book Maxi-Marketing, go on to say: “If you are not maximising use of the telephone in marketing the product, service or business you are promoting, you are in danger of being left behind.”

Indian telemarketing: wrong number?

Is telemarketing possible in India? With poor telephone services, inadequate penetration, poor call completion rates? In spite of all the odds, there are a few companies that are seriously experimenting with telemarketing in India. Some of them like the UDI Yellow Pages and Citibank claim to have met with tremendous success.

Telemarketing: selling phones?

A former minister while visiting an exhibition stall set up by a company that was doing telemarketing remarked: “Oh, so you do telemarketing? What price do your charger per telephone?” That just about sums up the knowledge level of an ‘average’ Indian about telemarketing.

When we talk about telemarketing, we talk of two types of marketing - outbound and inbound. Outbound telemarketing involves calling up a list of persons and delivering a sales message to them. The objective of the exercise could be to generate prospects, get hot leads or for getting sales.

Inbound telemarketing is the systematic usage of the telephone for in-coming sales orders. In a sense, the telephone number becomes the ‘coupon’ in the advertisement. Inbound telemarketing calls for a systematic approach to handling telephone enquiries in order to maximise response time and customer satisfaction.

A telemarketing experience

Most marketing pundits wave off telemarketing as an esoteric concept for a country like India. The questions raised are:

• Where to get the telephone lines?
• Where to hire the people who can sell through the phone?
• Will people be ready to receive the messages?

In addition to all these queries, one more was raised when the experiment was thought of by Ulka Advertising for Overseas Sanmar -- will the conservative Madrasi be willing to be disturbed at home?

The agency and the client decided to try out an experiment to generate hot prospects for Fixed Deposits, and to overcome all the above mentioned odds in stages.

In order to minimise costs and fixed overheads it was decided to employ housewives. These telesales persons were expected to work from home using their home telephones (an essential prerequisite), which was idle during most of the day anyway. Ulka felt that even though this would lead to a loss in control and supervision, the cost-economics far outweighed the drawbacks. The ladies had to be trained, coached in telemarketing techniques. This was done through a five day training programme.

While all this was going on, the client was busy generating a list of people to call - with names and telephone numbers. Not an easy exercise!

The experiment got underway with each telesales person armed with a selling script, a set of customer cards and system control forms. The telesales persons were to report to office, everyday for a half-hour review. This was imperative to monitor progress and to follow up prospects daily.

Red herrings and results

There were many apprehensions, many fears. The first few days produced numerous red herrings. But slowly, the team settled down. The experiment ran its course for about three months. There were some operational bottlenecks like inadequate follow up, poor call rate, etc. In spite of all these problems, 2560 persons were contacted over the phone in Madras. Well over 65 per cent of these persons were ‘not interested’ in Fixed Deposits (it must be mentioned that they too were given the two-minute corporate message). Of the balance, about 25 per cent were ‘interested’. These people were mailed a set of forms giving all the details. Some of these might have become depositors at a future date. Then came the ‘very interested’ category, or the hot prospects, about 8 per cent. Not all of them became depositors, a critical area that will need to be toned up in the future.

At an overall level, the prospect generation was not too high, but if one were to take into account the extent of financial junk mail and the clutter of finance companies in Madras, the response was very encouraging.

Conclusion

It is possible to use telemarketing effectively in our country. But before setting out, one should define the objective - is it to deliver a sales message, is it to generate hot prospects or it is to do full and final sale?

With increasing cost of sales force, petrol/travel and premium on customers’ time, the day is not too far when almost all companies in one-to-one selling will use telemarketing in some form or the other in our country as well.

(Based on an article that appeared in Brand Equity, 23rd December 1992)

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