As mentioned outsourcing telemarketing services offers a variety of potential benefits to your company.  Accordingly, based on WHY you choose to outsource and WHAT function(s) you outsource will determine which benefits are most relevant and important to you.

1 – It Is Cost-Effective

Outsourcing telemarketing services is often cost-effective for companies with limited experience and sales/marketing resources.  Because telemarketing campaigns may be initially small (think pilot-project) requiring only a small budget and investment of resources.

Start-up time for telemarketing services is less than conventional marketing options like print advertisement and direct mail.  Consequently, fast completion and review of the results help you determine whether outsourcing telemarketing services are cost-effective and produce the results your business requires.

The telemarketing services provider may offer a performance-based fee structure after completing the initial pilot project.  For example, your company costs may be a fee per qualified contact, qualified sales appointment, etc.

As a result, this allows your company to manage costs and provides clear metrics of the telemarketing campaign’s outcome and return-on-investment.

For this type of performance-based cost structure to work requires transparency and profitability for both parties.  Contrarily this is not available with alternative marketing options  like direct mail and print advertisement.

2 – It Offers Rapid Feedback

There is no substitute for the sound of a human voice on a telephone call.  Simply, other than a personal handshake, it is the most direct means of marketing contact with an existing or perspective customer.

Outsourcing telemarketing services to promote your company provides an immediate measure of interest in your products or services.  Basically, this direct, unfiltered communication between the telemarketing representative and the sales contact provides quick responses.  For example, these include their questions, needs, decision-making process, and level of interest.

Outsourcing telemarketing services to contact existing and prospective customers helps to differentiate your business from competitors.  Regardless of the type of customer, a business (B2B) or a consumer (B2C),  gaining an understanding of their needs and satisfaction creates greater customer loyalty   Consequently this helps create a barrier for your competition.

Also, you build rapport with your customers and create a personalized relationship which helps customizing your products and services.

3 – It Expands Business Rapidly

Your company can quickly expand by outsourcing telemarketing services to generate sales lead prospects and appointments.  Specifically your sales staff focuses on converting prospects to customers, that rapidly result in incremental sales revenue.

As your customer base expands, your sales personnel will require dedicating more time and resources to new customer retention which adds to increasing sales revenue.  Since there are an ebb and flow between new customer recruitment and existing customer retention, your staffing, financial resources and priorities will need to be in balance.

Your existing customers may not have bought your products or services for some time.  Basically, they are dormant or inactive and not generating revenue.

Outsourcing telemarketing services allow you to engage these types of customers with messages of appreciation and special offers to reactivate their interest level in your company.  Basically, start generating revenue again.

Telemarketing provides instant feedback as to why they are not currently active customers.   Also, it offers new sales opportunities and potential referrals as well.

You already know who they are.  Like jewelry they need to be periodically polished, so find out why they are not generating business for you.

4 – It Increases Company Efficiency

Outsourcing telemarketing services allows your company is able to leverage their resources and experience to increase efficiency of operations.   Generally there is a reduction in costs and increased quality versus investing in telemarketing activities internally.

This should not be difficult to understand.  In brief, this is because the telemarketing provider’s investments in equipment, technology, training, and staffing cannot be justified by most companies since that is not their primary business focus.

Depending upon your business sales process, your internal marketing and sales personnel should focus on converting qualified sales prospects to customers rather than searching and filtering for prospects.  Because streamlining your company’s internal sales process results in more sales conversions and lowers the cost of customer acquisition.

A major benefit of outsourcing telemarketing services is the real-world experience gained by a history of multiple clients.  Accordingly your company personnel benefits from this knowledge to improve their productivity and efficiency to focus on other core areas of business.

5 – It Expands Market Reach

Generally businesses are limited is their market coverage due to resources. For example, these resources may be technology, knowledge, personnel, time, finances, etc.  Accordingly outsourcing telemarketing services can help supplement these resource limitations, with a low level investment and risk.

If your business market is primarily local, outsourcing telemarketing services allow you trial and expansion, zip code by zip code.  Consequently, your company staff and resources can be stretched in a manageable fashion as you increase customers and sales.

Where telemarketing is successful you can repeat this as your company resources allow.  Otherwise, review, adjust or switch the marketing strategy.

For your existing customers, new products and services can be marketed by telemarketing.  Meanwhile this provides the opportunity of incremental sales and new customer referrals that expand the reach of your sales staff.

DISCLOSURE: Nexus Teleservices is a Nearshore Outsourcing Telemarketing Services business provider.

6 – It Provides Measurable Results

You should not be surprised if your company does NOT have similar in-house data to allow for comparison.

To start, we need to review some basics about call center outsourcing services.

Firstly, a call center is a centralized facility that is equipped to handle large amounts of customer telephone requests for an organization. Basically, a call center handles telephone-based communications with prospective, new, and existing customers.  Also, the “call center agents” may communicate via chat, email, and social media.  This is called a multi-channel “contact center”.

Secondly, call center outsourcing is a decision by a company to subcontract its call center management function to an external third-party vendor who does it for a living.  Generally, a company reaches this decision if the call center management function is NOT perceived to be their core business value or it is something they are very uncomfortable with doing.

Now let’s discuss some of the call center outsourcing advantages.

1 – Save Time

One of the key call center outsourcing advantages is that it helps save time for company management.  Time is a business asset that is always limited, cannot be purchased, is often wasted, and critical to the success of any business.  In simple terms, proper time management is crucial to business success, whether it is the owner, a manager, or a member of the workgroup.

Successful time management for a company manager is all about self-control and the ability to assess and justify how the time is being invested.   Accordingly, what is the core focus of the company should be prioritized, and the remainder should be delegated to a third-party call center outsourcing provider.

The underlying assumption is that the call center function is NOT a core focus of the company.  So the company management is involved in managing the provider relationship and not the call center operational details.    Consequently, company management saves time for more productive business activities.

Successful companies use call center outsourcing to maximizing their productive use of time.  Specifically, their management prioritizes and focuses on what is important to the success of the company and delegate the rest.

2 – Reduce Costs

One of the key call center outsourcing advantages is the opportunity for a company to produce significant costs savings related to its call center functions. Because most companies are under pressure to manage or reduce costs, using a third-party provider is generally less expensive than doing it in-house.

Specifically, your company can eliminate costs related to facility space, infrastructure, call center technology, support, capital, and most significantly, labor costs.  So this can produce significant savings for your company because labor is the highest percentage of the call center function.

COST SAVINGS

The resultant cost savings allows your company to invest in improving quality, adding additional services for your customers, expanding to other business areas, or simply increasing your financial capital.

3 – Simplify Scaling

When a company is in the second phase of its business cycle, the growth phase, it is time to scale up. That is, it needs to make decisions to adjust, grow, and expand profitably. Accordingly, the variety of call center outsourcing advantages allows a company to manage this growth phase.

Scaling Challenges

What types of growth challenges will a company experience as it scales up? Following are challenges most companies experience:

Scaling Solutions

A company using third-party call center outsourcing services allows it to deal with the above business challenges in a variety of ways. For example these include:

Call center outsourcing advantages allow a company to adapt to the growth and changes of this business phase.  However, the company is still challenged by the required overall planning, funding, systems, staffing, processes, and technology.  But using call center outsourcing services provides a company with a variety of options to help scale up for these challenges.

4 – Increase Flexibility

For a company to be successful in this changing world, it must be flexible. Specifically, the business environment constantly experiences rapid changes in technology, economy, client behavior, and governmental legislation. Consequently, only companies that are flexible to adapt to these changes will succeed. Conversely, more rigid companies will fail to adapt and not survive.

Flexibility Options

Among the call center outsourcing advantages is providing a company with a range of options to increase flexibility and adaptability. Consequently, here are some ideas a company should consider to evaluate its business flexibility:

A company that is flexible responds to change by evolving. Consequently, most flexible companies do not fight change.  But rather they accept and adapt as a normal aspect of the changing business environment.

5 – Increase Efficiency

One of the call center outsourcing advantages is that it helps increase the efficiency of a company. Efficiency measures how well a company converts inputs like capital, labor, and materials into outputs like revenue, products, and services.

There are three main areas of company efficiency that greatly benefit from using call center outsourcing services: financial, labor, and operations. Let’s discuss each in greater detail.

Financial Efficiency

A company’s financial efficiency measures its expenses as a percentage of revenue. Consequently using a third-party call center provider saves time, reduces labor costs, simplifies company scaling, and increases flexibility. So, this reduces a company’s expenses and increases its revenue.

Labor Efficiency

The labor efficiency of a company is the measure of employee output in an hour of work. As shown above, redistributing labor activities based on priority, value, skillset, and cost improves the total level of workgroup output. Additionally, adapting technology improvements to a distributed workgroup allows for increased productivity and flexibility.

Operations Efficiency

Operations efficiency is related to the core company processes such as manufacturing and services delivery. Because this is where the majority of business costs occur. Hence call center outsourcing services save time, lower labor costs, and strengthens adaptability to changes in processes and procedures. As a result, the whole area of a company’s operations is streamlined over time.

BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS (B2B)

Data Cleansing

This is a process used to ensure a company’s customer information database is consistent and accurate.  By removing inconsistencies from database records (as well as clearing inactive users), telemarketing service representatives (TSRs) are more likely to have the information needed to more completely and efficiently service customers.  This type of telemarketing activity may verify information such as an address, phone number, current account holder, account type, and desired level of service.

Customer Appreciation

It is important to understand that customers appreciate being contacted proactively if it serves their interests.  The key is their interests.  Your company needs to ensure that there is alignment between their interests and your reason for contacting them.

This type of telemarketing activity is performed to thank a customer for loyalty to your business and are not sales calls in the  traditional sense.  However as part of this process, the TSR can identify whether:

Charity Fundraising

Non-profit agencies use both outbound and inbound telemarketing calls for market awareness and to raise charity donations.  Agencies periodically conduct pledge drives through various marketing channels that result in an influx of donor calls, hence inbound telemarketing.  Outbound telemarketing is used for recruitment, cultivation and retention of the agency’s donor list.

Political Registration/Voter Participation

Political telemarketing services vary from voter registration, polling, Get Out The Vote (GOTV), voice broadcasting and campaign fundraising.   GOTV drives are the final stages of voter engagement campaigns where political groups are looking to drive as many supporters or registered voters to the polls.  Since there is limited time, political organizations need to rely on various tools to simplify and scale up to a high volume.

Market Research

Outbound telemarketing for market research is often used for product/service reviews and customer feedback. This is a highly cost-effective means for conducting large-scale market research and can cover vast geographical locations from a single base. TSRs conducting interviews can range from small executive level surveying to nationwide customer feedback questioning.

Sales Lead Generation

Whether B2B or B2C,  telemarketing sales lead generation is used to qualify a company’s prospects by adhering to strict qualifying criteria.  This model (often outsourced to a third-party call-center provider) represents the separation of cold calling and prospect qualification from sales appointment setting and the actual selling by the company’s internal or field sales force.

This division of the sales process allows a company to more effectively use their more expensive sales personnel to do what they do best: use their extensive knowledge, communication, presentation, negotiating and closing skills to convert prospects into new customers and deals.

New Customer Acquisition

Businesses need new customers for their growth and survival.  Using outbound telemarketing services to find, qualify and sign-up new customers is an effective direct marketing system.  Whether it is a TSR calling prospects from a dialing list or via a pre-recorded message using a computerized dialing system, there is no prior existing relationship.  It is often referred to as cold-calling or dialing for dollars.

Telesales

Once a company has identified and qualified a customer prospect (by whatever means), telesales is the process that sells your products or services directly to the customer by telephone.  Telesales converts those opportunities into business for your company.  Depending upon the market (business or consumer) and complexity of the product/service, the telesales process may entail one or a  series of telephone calls until sales success.

Collections

One of the types of telemarketing services that companies often require is the collecting of outstanding invoices payments from their customers.  This is important to maintain cash flow and working capital for a company’s development.

If the company list of debtors is small, this process of contacting customers via the telephone is handled internally by the accounting group.  If the list of debtors is large, however, this process is often handled by a dedicated tele-collections team or outsourced to a third-party provider.

Customer Reactivation

Using telemarketing services to reactive your customer base is one of the highest ROI opportunities a company can invest in.  At some point in the past, these inactive customers purchased from you or engaged with your company in some way. You’ve already spent the time, effort, and money to get them as a customer, so it is much more cost-effective to bring them back than it is to find new customers.

There are many reasons why a customer no longer uses a company’s products or services. Customer Reactivation telemarketing is simply designed to understand why they stopped being active and entice them to become active customers again.