Call Centre Growth in India Faltering – The Beginning of the End for Outsourced Contact?

According to new research the call centre industry in India, from a position of prominence is now faltering in the wake of companies wishing to move their operations back to the UK and to countries in South East Asia.

The reasons behind this stalling are multiple. As always customer difficulties with the Indian accent have been presented, despite extensive ‘neutral accent training’ at Indian call centres. Adding to the problems for Indian call centres however is the decreasing kudos of call centre jobs within India and the result of rising living costs in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi.

There are now an increasing number of companies bringing their call centre operations back to native shores. One is Santander, the Spanish owned bank which now has a contact centre within the UK; another is Aviva, which has moved part of their operation to Norwich.

These developments can be seen as part of a wider u-turn made by many companies who originally outsourced to India and other off-shore centres primarily to save money. At the time their perception was that customer service and experience levels would be maintained but in many cases that proved not to be the case.

The resulting customer frustration has often arisen because of the inability of off-shore agents to converse with customers ‘naturally.’ Cultural differences, language barriers and rigid, scripted call structures have all led to a general feeling of dissatisfaction amongst UK consumers. Eventually this reflected poorly on the brands which jumped on the off-shoring bandwagon.

Recently however this bandwagon is faltering and both Aviva and Santander form part of a growing trend for “on-shoring,” or bringing call centres back to the UK. This trend actually began some time ago with a number of brands now using the fact they are returning as both a USP and a positive PR story.

Rather than the spin associated with this PR however, the real reason why such companies are coming back to the UK is that they have finally realised hanging on to customers during tough economic times is as important as cutting costs. Providing a good customer experience is now a priority ... something which in many cases was not paramount in the off-shore model.

Is it the beginning of the end for off-shore call centres? Perhaps in the Indian example it may be, although ultimately it is the realisation that a good customer experience is the most economically viable way to retain customers which will signal the death knell for off-shoring.

B2B Marketing Fundamentals – Your Identity & Target

In a recent blog I outlined some of EWA’s fundamentals when it comes to B2B marketing. Within the blog 3 main areas were explored, which if understood could help you to make positive changes in your marketing efforts. The first of these areas is Your Identity & Target, which are both vitally important if your marketing is to be effectively focussed. Consider the following in order to achieve this marketing fundamental.

Who are you and what do you offer?

As a business you should have a clear idea of who you are but it is equally important to define this in a concise statement. This statement should combine your company identity with the types of services where you excel, clearly showing any potential clients your positioning, whatever the communication medium.

What is your target market?

Marketing without targeting is unlikely to be effective or profitable making identifying a target audience for your B2B marketing essential. Any targeting exercise should consider who you are planning to sell your services or products to by defining the size and type of businesses they should be.

Why should businesses buy from you?

By now you will have established your own identity and even the role that your specialities play in this, however, it is also important to consider your USPs (Unique Selling Points). These USPs are what sets your business apart from the competition and should consist of specific features and benefits customers will gain if they choose you.

Who do you need to speak to?

The final area of your identity and targeting is to define exactly who you need to contact. Ideally these contacts should be someone within a business with the power to make decisions as to arranging meeting with the key stakeholders in the company. For some businesses this may purely be the MD, but with others this could be a marketing manager or commercial director.

B2B differs from B2C in that the people you deal with have different considerations to make and are driven by different purchasing factors. By asking yourself these questions and setting your stall out early on in the marketing process you should be able to find ways to appeal to these purchasing factors from the outset, greatly improving the chances of success for your marketing.

B2B Marketing Fundamentals

A conversation with a friend prompted this blog. He was asking how he should go about developing a marketing strategy for his business as they are due to launch in a new market. We had a long, productive conversation which hopefully put him on the right path; but it struck me during this conversation that maybe other people would benefit from a little help and advice.

So in order to share some of the basics of our collective experience, here are EWA’s B2B marketing fundamentals:

Your Identity & Target

1. Clearly define and state who you are and what it is you offer (as well as what you’re REALLY good at) – develop a positioning statement you can use across multiple mediums.
2. Decide on your target market – who do you want to sell your services to, what sort (and size) of businesses are they?
3. State why businesses should buy from you – what are your USPs? – think about your features and benefits you offer.
4. Decide on the best people to make contact with at your target companies – which job role would you typically make contact with first? (And who signs the cheques?)
   

Your Website & Data

1. Make sure your website is earning its keep – does your site generate enquiries and leads for you, can interested businesses easily find you online?
2. Track who visits your website – specialist software can give you insight into who visits and what they look at.
3. Get your data sorted – clean what you have and then buy more if needed and make sure it’s in a proper database, not lurking on a spreadsheet somewhere. B2B campaigns either sink or swim based on the quality of the data used

Your Voice & Interaction

1. Become thought leaders in your sector – give people a reason to listen to what you have to say – build trust and become a source of information.
2. Write a blog – share your thoughts, opinions, advice and guidance. It will build trust in your prospective customers (as well as having SEO benefits).
3. Develop a social media strategy – it’s becoming as important as having a plain old website – make and foster new connections.
4. Use online business network tools – Make genuine connections and engage in conversations with people looking for your services.
5. Get help from specialists where you need it – you can’t do everything yourself and engaging the right agencies can make a huge difference (do you know the difference between organic and paid search, how to conduct successful telemarketing, which PR sites to post your stories on??).

Clearly this isn’t an exhaustive list and each point on its own will be discussed in a separate blog post. It’s really just a starting point to bigger conversations so if you consider carefully what marketing you do currently, use the guidance above and make some positive changes, you should join my friend on the right B2B marketing track.

Stop doing any Marketing you can’t Measure

All of your marketing activity should be trackable, right down to the specific campaign and channel which generated every enquiry or sale.

Why?

Because if you can’t trace a sale or lead back to its source (how did the person become aware of your company or the product you’re selling), then how can you know whether your marketing budget is being spent on the right things? How can you know which campaign (and channel) is the most effective and which isn’t?

Put simply, you can’t. And you should be able to.

If your marketing activity isn’t generating results (and profit), stop doing it. If you are seeing results and can track where they came from, do a great deal more of it. You’ll only know whether to stop or do more if you’re measuring the results.

Effective data management and customer insight goes a long way to fixing this challenge. Providing you’ve put in the effort up front and used response codes or sent campaigns via traceable mediums such as email, data analytics will tell you exactly which campaign has been successful and why.

Success can be a little subjective but ultimately it’s all about revenue. Did your campaign generate sufficient profit (at the right margin) once you have deducted the actual costs to consider doing more of it? If the answer is yes, then you know what you should do... much, much more!

If you’re scratching your head at this point and wondering how to make your campaigns much more effective, come and talk to us. We’ve a huge amount of experience in designing, implementing and analysing marketing campaigns which have delivered real results for our clients.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Assess and Improve

The final post in our series on direct marketing campaign planning is dedicated to studying the ways to assess where your campaign has been successful and to develop processes which will improve future marketing activities.

The first element of this process is to assess which elements were successful and to learn from the campaign by identifying:

• The segments which were most successful in terms of responses and revenue generated. It is also important to find out the reasons behind this as this will instrumental in shaping future marketing strategies.
• Which channels were most preferred by recipients and why.
• If there are any trends within the data and if there are any conclusions which can be drawn from these trends.
• The successful calls to action. The importance of the call to action within your marketing messages should never be underestimated and any opportunity to gain data on which have been most popular should be taken.
• If there were particular combinations of communication channels which was most successful, for example a direct mail message followed by telemarketing or a website/email combination.
• If there was an ideal time period to follow up on the original marketing message in order to generate the largest revenue.

The second clement is to use this information to improve future campaigns. This can be done by...

• Collecting and managing the analytical data gained throughout the campaign with the aim of building propensity models.
• Using these propensity models to create specific audience segments which are statistically most likely to respond to marketing messages.
• Using data about calls to action to find and implement refined marketing messages on a segment by segment basis.
• Use all of the data to indentify where and how it is possible to build the relationship over time, encouraging purchasing behaviour in the long term.

Throughout this series we have studied:

• The benefits of setting the foundations of your campaigns early on in the process by understanding your business and the campaign objective
• The importance of effectively managing your campaign data,
• Developing marketing messages which are targeted towards your audience, and
• How to handle your responses most efficiently and also how to measure the success of the campaign.

This final stage in the process reinforces the cyclical nature of direct marketing. Where the lessons learnt from one campaign form a significant element in the next; helping to improve the return on investment for direct marketing campaigns and build long lasting, profitable customer relationships.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Measuring Success

A key component of your direct marketing campaign is planning the ways in which you will measure success. Success however can only be assessed by looking at your multichannel approach and finding key performance indicators for each individual channel.

Methods for measuring the success of your campaign channels include:

Direct Mail - Measuring the success of your direct mail marketing requires evaluation of the total responses, only possible if effective response handling processes have been enacted (see our previous post).

Online - If you are using a website as a major communications channel there are numerous ways to measure responses. Web tracking technology such as Google Analytics will enable you to track, measure and report on the success of marketing communications. Similarly, this is possible with online advertising mediums where click through rates and interactions should be measured.

Email - If your campaign utilises email the most efficient ways to measure success are to track and assess the number of successful sends, the rate of opens and furthermore, the interaction levels for the emails sent out.

Telephone – The call-to-lead ratio is one of the key indicators for success with direct telemarketing activities. Measurement of success with telemarketing however should be based upon both qualitative and quantitative data.

Combining the insight from each of your communications channels makes it possible to assess the overall success of the campaign. Essentially there are two identifiers for success. The first is whether the campaign costs were exceeded by the attributable revenue - this will tell you whether the campaign was financially successful; in the short term.

The other indicator of success is the amount of new customer revenue the campaign achieved. This figure gives not only gives an idea of the short term accomplishments of the campaign but also provides an idea of the future revenue and the added value provided by the marketing activity.

Measuring the success of your campaign is not however the final element in an effective direct marketing campaign, in our next post will explore the ways in which it is possible to use this data to learn from your campaign and improve future marketing activities.

Direct Marketing Campaign Planning – Handling Your Responses

The latest instalment of our series on planning a direct marketing campaign is dedicated to the subject of response handling, and how this vitally important aspect of the campaign should be planned in order to yield the most significant benefit. Planning how to handle the responses returned from your direct marketing can be split into 2 major areas; the first, your methods of collecting different responses and secondly how the responses (and subsequent data) should be managed.

Collecting Your Responses

Previously the importance of a multichannel approach has been presented, however it is important to understand how to collect the different responses returned from such an approach.

Telephone – If one of your channels utilises inbound phone calls to collect responses it is vital to create a team of customer service professionals to handle these calls, a team that understand the objectives of the campaign and has been effectively trained to handle responses.

Email – Setting up a dedicated email address is another form of collecting responses. This can be a single email address or multiple addresses in accordance with the direct marketing segments.

Website – Depending upon the marketing strategy, the creation of a campaign specific website can be a worthwhile course of action. This website or simply a landing page should contain the enquiry forms and may even operate an Iframe to harvest the responses.

Social Media – Increasingly social media is being used within direct marketing campaigns due to its growing popularity as a marketing medium. Once again, campaign specific pages can be set up to handle responses whilst connections made through social media can be an effective way to build customer profiles.

Managing Your Responses

Once you have decided which response channels to use as part of your campaign, to ensure they are managed effectively it is important to undertake the following.

• Firstly, you should make an assessment of your in-house capabilities, investigating your internal capacity to handle/manage responses.
• Secondly, if this assessment reveals that your internal capacity is insufficient, you may want to consider outsourcing response handling activities.
• Finally, whether the handling activities are being handled in-house or outsourced, it is vitally important to set out, precisely what defines an opportunity, as this will be used when determining the success of the project.

Response handling is a key component in any marketing campaign whilst understanding multiple response channels and whether an in-house or outsourced solution will be most effective are both important in the planning stage.