When we think of call centers, we often think of customer service. In reality, however, there are two kinds of call centers: inbound and outbound. Inbound centers accept traffic from customers and focus on customer service. Outbound centers, on the other hand, initiate contact with the customers and do this to offer a variety of products and services, among other things. In short, contact centers aren’t just a customer service operation, they are perfectly suitable for marketing.
That is especially true in today’s world, where contact center technology offers even more tools for your business to reach out and engage your customers.
CRM is the Secret
The most important part of your marketing efforts will be through the use of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Modern contact centers are equipped with CRM software that lets them track and build profiles for each of their customers -- complete with contact information like emails, telephone numbers and home addresses. Coupled with customer profiles on what customers like and their history of purchases, CRM is the perfect way to create targeted lists to direct your marketing efforts.
Once you have your targeted lists, you have several options to do marketing.
Outbound Calls - the old-fashioned way of calling the customer is also the most effective. A 2012 study from the Direct Marketing Association shows that marketing campaigns are most successful through calls with a 12.95% response rate, rather than other methods like mail catalogues or postcards.
SMS Notifications - today’s consumer market is a lot different from how it was in the 90’s. Consumers are more connected and online than ever before and respond well to SMS messages for products and services. 82.1% of people read all their SMS messages, so you get a lot of coverage and results from SMS campaigns.
Automated Emails - sending out emails is another easy way to promote a product or service. While not as effective as calls or SMS, emails require no additional costs and can be managed extremely easily by your marketing department.
It’s important to remember that you don’t need to be working outbound to promote products. You can still do a lot of marketing through inbound operations. One important fact to remember is that although call centers were initially setup to address customer problems and concerns, by the 90s businesses realized that the call center was better used to keep and attract new customers.
Service to Sales
When a customer contacts you for assistance, you know that these consumers are interested in your products as they already avail from your services. Call center marketers take advantage of this to upsell or promote related products or services. By using data gleaned from CRM, you can create customized prompts in the scripts used by call center agents to promote products and services during customer interactions. This is known as “Service to Sales.”
Service to Sales is used in a wide-variety of scenarios to cross sell and upsell, including:
Upgrading existing subscriptions
Getting product insurance
Announcing new products or product lines
In today’s marketing landscape, contact center marketing is part and parcel of almost every marketing campaign. The machinery is there for a strong communications platform that can easily get in touch with customers. It would be a shame not to make use of it. The opportunity to engage your customers through an existing part of your operations means you get to save on marketing costs, and it helps keep your company’s brand present in the minds of people.