Using an outsource telemarketing company is a real leap of faith. Your reputation and your brand are on the line – so what should you be looking for in your outsource company?

Continued from our Spring e-zine - see part 1

Training

The outsource telemarketing company should be capable of taking your brief and training the agents accordingly after the set-up meeting. There should be no problem in you being there to help during training sessions if you want to be – but it would be wrong if you were asked to train the agents alone with no help from the outsourcers training department. It’s often useful too that you are there on the day that the campaign begins to answer any unexpected questions that might occur.

Scripts

Ask your outsourcer what they think about scripts and how they put together the approach that their agents are going to use.

A regimented script is never a good approach. Far better is a call guide that has a good introduction, core pitch, good intelligent questions and has a rational ‘order of play’. Stock answers are essential on a separate sheet to aid the agent answer whatever questions come up.

When your campaign goes live

Your outsource telemarketing agency should be watching your campaign ultra closely at the beginning. Notes should be taken on the amount of decision maker speak to contacts, whether there is any part of the conversation over the telephone that wasn’t expected etc. If the campaign is watched closely at the start, then there is ample time to tweak the things that are not working quite the way anticipated before too much time is lost.

Your account manager

Your campaign should have been allocated to an account manager – a person normally on hand to make sure you are abreast of the campaign and notify you of its progress. Your account manager should normally be readily available on the other side of the telephone (or mobile) if you need to call. More often than not though it should be your account manager contacting you to pass on good news.

A successful outsource partnership

Should be one where you feel you are truly in a long term mutually beneficial relationship. Your agency should be quick to respond to changes that are deemed necessary to make the campaigns more successful and you should be able to visit whenever you want without feeling uncomfortable.

Ultimately your agency should feel like a part of your own company – but offsite and without the payroll and other headaches that go with employing telesales agents directly.