Once seen as a source of competitive advantage, placing your customer at the heart of your organisation and developing a culture of ‘serving the customer’ is now a necessity for corporate survival. Satisfied, loyal advocates of your brand or business must be cultivated by every employee (and third party provider) of your business and requires a continuous commitment to developing a customer relationship shared vision.
Examining all their interactions and the message, image and relationships being conveyed to customers is information that is vital to organisations intent on generating customer loyalty. And the humble telephone can be a means of providing this information. Well executed it can also leave the customer with the sense that the company really cares about them.
With telephone market research surveys you can:
- Dial random numbers when you don’t have a respondent actual number.
- Incorporate the use of CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews) to automate the process of gathering data and reporting.
- Manage complex questionnaires using CATI. Including the automatic skipping of questions, ability to perform calculations and to modify questions asked based on response.
- Probe further to clarify response (gaining a qualitative feel to your quantitative surveys).
- Combine survey answers with pre-existing information you have about the respondent (assuming your CRM is up to scratch of course).
Success on the phone is predicated by a commitment to research, planning and proper execution of each call in partnership with your market research agency. Here are just some of the things that you should consider:
- Establish the goals of your telephone market research project – what do you want to learn? Eg:
a. The potential market for a new product or service
b. Ratings of an existing product or service
c. Employee attitudes
d. Customer satisfaction levels
e. Reader / viewer / user opinions
f. Corporate image perceptions - Determine your sample – who do you want to interview? Consider the kind of people (targets) that you want to speak to and 2Europe will guide how many of them you require (sample size).
- 2Europe can create and structure your questionnaire – what will you ask them?
- Pre-test the questions to check for consistency and unanticipated responses eg through unclear wording.
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Aha, that was good, since we are currently hiring new call centers for our customers’ lead generation programs. Know anybody to recommend? In any case, a lot to ponder about. By the way, I find it almost amusing that the contact center and telemarketing industry was pioneered in America (arising out of a necessity to centralize customer service operations to cut cost in the eighties), and now it seems that India and South America totally pooled the blanket towards their territories and became major BPO outsourcing regions. In the past companies used call centers to differentiate themselves from competitors with outstanding customer care, in the hope that handling client concerns timely and efficiently would encourage brand loyalty. And now those that don’t use outsourced tele centers seem to be black swans. Anyways, great coverage. Thank you.