If you’ve ever answered a telephone, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered a drone-like telemarketer sales copy from a script. Like most people, you disconnect the call and move on. While outbound cold-calling still exists, it’s fading away in favor of dedicated marketing call centers.
A Bad Rap
While a customer call center isn’t for everyone, they play a valuable role in cultivating and maintaining customer relationships for many brands. In this age of email, chats, and messaging apps, it might be easy to dismiss telephone customer service as outdated.
At the same time, it’s interesting to note phone conversations with customers are still going strong as part of the sales funnel. Roughly $1 trillion in consumer spending is influenced by calls placed to businesses. A customer service call center could be your ticket to increased sales and maintaining solid customer relationships.
“Your Call is Very Important to Us…”
Whether you choose to utilize outbound sales calls or rely on inbound sales calls, a dedicated marketing call center makes sense. In a recent survey, 62% of companies view customer experience delivered by the contact call centers as a competitive competitive advantage in customer retention.
Not Your Average Outbound Call
Unlike cold calling, in which random businesses are contacted via an autodialer in the hopes of landing a live prospect, a marketing call center works with existing customers and clients to focus on retention by publicizing new products, following up on complaints or other service-related issues.
By focusing on relationship-building with existing customers, dedicated call center agents play a key role in retention. Focusing on customer retention makes sense. It is 25 times more expensive to onboard a new customer than to keep an already existing one. Retention makes good economic sense in today’s business climate.
Telephone customer service has evolved light years away from seedy telemarketing operations. Instead, smart brands rely on dedicated customer service call centers to enhance existing customer relationships by having a “live person” on the other end who can answer questions and respond to service-related issues with skill and tact.
A customer service call center staffed by well-trained and knowledgeable agents could be your secret weapon to creating and enhancing customer relationships.