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First Contact: Are You Ready?

First Contact: Are You Ready?

The Paramount Pictures film First Contact is the story of the first contact of the human species with extraterrestrials (Vulcans). The Borg travelled back in time to prevent it from happening as part of their plot to subjugate the human race.

Today, companies face a similar challenge in business. Sure most processes are optimized for the existing customer who knows what to expect. But, what impression does that first contact by a potential buyer make? And in the world of 'instant information gratification' or as the Ask.com people say, 'getification' what are the right approaches to take in the web, in email response and in telephone answering practices that would maximize the impression and maximize the potential of that first contact?

My company, Brockmann & Company recently published a report for marketers, webmasters and email administrators that set out to answer these questions. Here are three key findings:

Email is king of first contact.

Half of our business-to-business buyers chose email as their first contact mechanism of choice. So, email is a very important mode of communicating with potential vendors. Buyers chose this mode because it was most convenient - took the least amount of time (compared to a phone call) and could be initiated in a short period of time. Larger buyers were 50% more likely to use email than lesser buyers.

Open contact counts.

83% of buyers said that their perception of a vendor would improve if email and telephone information for real persons were made available on the website. How to use web forms (see example here) to do this is discussed in the report.

Anti-spam security technologies used by the seller matters.

9% of respondents thought a challenge email (reply to the original email to guarantee delivery to the intended person) was frustrating, yet getting their email trapped in the vendor's spam folder was 4 four times MORE frustrating. In fact, getting no response from the vendor was considered less frustrating than having email trapped in the vendor's spam folder. That's because spam filtering continues to inspect incoming email from legitimate business contacts and often interfere with the user's experience with email. Challenge-response technology does not interfere with email from approved senders, they only effect the first time contact, and in this study, the 260 buyers surveyed saw it as an advantage.

The report is available for a limited time as a free download. Check it out.

Peter Brockmann is a high tech consultant and market researcher. Learn more at www.brockmann.com.

The Call-Center Rope Line

Celebrity nightclub rope lines -– where burly bouncers whisk in A-listers to VIP treatment while rest of us wait in queue -– might be a snobbish cliché, but maybe not such a bad model for call centers. 

Most companies conducting marketing campaigns know little to nothing about the people calling them in response to those campaigns. Marketers spend millions analyzing and segmenting their existing customers into value-based rankings (e.g., platinum, gold, silver, bronze), with each receiving their associated level of benefits and service. Why is it that  all inbound prospects are treated the same?

Not all prospects are created equal. Too often bad prospects waste too much of your call center resources and divert attention away from potentially high-value prospects.

For example, a major credit card company recently came to us, looking for insight on ways to improve conversion rates of potentially highly profitable customers. They are great at getting consumers to respond after running flashy commercials and encouraging calls to their 800-numbers. Each ad generates a flood of calls from people about whom they know nothing. This means that they are treating the multimillion dollar CEO and the 18-year-old college student the exact same way.

Both of those prospects were getting the same treatment and offer as every other caller. With each call screening taking about 15 minutes, many unlikely prospects were taking precious attention away from the best prospects, who were getting put on hold, lost in the mix, or connected to rookie or, worse, outsourced “overflow” agents. In fact, we found that calls channeled to the wrong agent resulted in a 40 percent drop in their ability to convert high-value prospects to customers.  

What if the credit card company could identify and prioritize prospects before reaching the agent? What if they could score all callers ahead of time, whisking the potentially high value A-listers off to VIP treatment (e.g., lower rates) while presenting bad prospects with credit card offers more suited to their situation?  

The fact is they can.

Real-time data relationships have made it possible to identify, in a split second, the value potential of every inbound caller based on each company’s unique criteria. Caller name-address-phone number data linked with highly detailed household data and buyer purchase-propensity analysis enables call centers to precisely score each caller in real time and handle them accordingly. With these prospect “decision scores” in hand, call centers can make sure the right calls are prioritized and channeled to the right agents. They can make better offers based on the prospect’s financial viability. And they can better utilize their internal call-center resources.  

Most companies know how to profile their good prospects. The direct mail you receive, for example, is a result of their analytical and segmentation capabilities. But they’ve been flying blind when fielding inbound calls from unknown prospects. The good news is, they’ve now got 20/20 insight into these callers, enabling them to channel their A-list prospects past the call center rope line and convert them to high-value customers.

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Paul McConville

Director of Consumer-Facing Services for TARGUSinfo, a marketing services company in the Virginia suburbs of DC.

You can reach me at paulmcconville at TARGUSinfo dot com.
http://www.TARGUSinfo.com/marketing

I spent billions on marketing for this?

Your most valuable assets are your customers, so you’ve probably spent big bucks on a CRM system that helps you increase repeat business. But what about calls from people who have never spoken to you before? Do you really know who’s on the other end of that inbound call? Are you even prepared to handle that unknown caller appropriately?

A surprising number of world-class companies aren’t.

Case in point: One Thursday night while watching 30 Rock on NBC, one of the leading telecom providers ran an ad touting a new wireless phone with an 800 number to call. Since an ad in that primetime slot probably runs in the $200K-$300K range, I was feeling mischievous and wanted to test how well one of the world’s best known brands converts customers through this pricey inbound marketing effort.

The first call was quickly answered, but I was just as quickly bumped out to a busy signal. Hmmm … maybe viewer response to the ad triggered a momentary spike in inbound calls, I figured. But a second attempt was unsuccessful as well. The company never found out who I was, where I lived and whether I was a new prospect or longtime customer. So the next day I fired off an email to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, politely letting him know that his call handling business fell down on the job.

On the following Monday, the company’s Head of US Telesales calls me, not at all happy with my contact with her marketing counterpart. The CMO took her out to the woodshed, saying “We spent $1.2 billion on marketing last year and we can’t get anyone to answer the phone?” I wasn’t expecting an apology and I didn’t get one as she vented her anger.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that unanswered calls were only part of her problem. The company didn’t have a closed loop for acquiring customers who said they were interested in their service. How many other qualified leads of people who did get through were falling through the cracks, simply because the reps didn’t find out who was on the other end of phone before the call ended? If someone called to ask about the phone and for whatever reason didn’t sign up, would the company have any way of following up on the warm lead? I never got a follow-up call or a mailer.

I wanted to explain to her what her customer service agents already know: that when prospects call you for the first time, you’re flying blind. Even big companies like hers have yet to grasp that their best asset in a transaction is knowing the consumer they’re dealing with ― starting with phone number, name and address so they can keep the dialog going.

If you fail to have at your fingertips a caller's contact information, then you're throwing your marketing investments out the window. For all the millions spent to make the phone ring, don't you want to know who's calling?

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Paul McConville

Director of Consumer-Facing Services for TARGUSinfo, a marketing services company in the Virginia suburbs of DC.

You can reach me at paulmcconville at TARGUSinfo dot com.
http://www.TARGUSinfo.com/marketing

Now, Shall We Buzz from CRM to CEM?

By Tom Richards

Business is so quick to embrace the latest buzz phrase in their quest for customer loyalty--but a phrase does not make a strategy. Bob Thompson, president of CRM Guru, has just pronounced CRM dead and has changed the name of his company to Customer-Think. Goes to show you, don't name a company after a buzz phrase.

                        

Bob's not alone, of course. Others are declaring CRM dead. Too many cost overruns, poor workflows, disgruntled employees and unhappy customers, they say.

What's the new buzz phrase?