Are you cold calling?

If you make enough phone calls, there are bound to be a few that result in unexpected outcomes. Often, customer reactions or customer requests can be modeled over time so that in any given week, 23% of inbound calls will relate to, say, returns & refunds, 16% to, delivery queries and 14% to, payment queries. There trackable endpoints are known as resolution codes or disposition codes.

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission - Fred Allen

There is a skill in handling disposition codes. Too many and it's difficult to slot a given query into a category, too few and your analytics get skewed as dissimilar customer events are being counted together.

Why does it matter?

It matters because disposition codes are a great way of learning for the organisation. It can be very valuable data to inform process changes, proposition changes, training improvements, IT developments, etc. In other words it's valuable feedback on how to improve service delivery. Say, in the 72 hours after an email blast the proportion of calls relating to "hot to find content on the web site" rises by more than 50% over it's mean level in the previous week, perhaps there is scope to embed better instructions into the email? Or perhaps landing zones active for the email campaign should be designed better to make content easier to find? In any event - this is valuable data and used intelligently, across the organisation it can lead to vastly improved customer outcomes. Often the call centre is the first to know that something is happeneing sub-optimally elsewhere in the enterprise.

Designing disposition codes is largely common sense. For example, in a hospitality environment, clusters of queries relating to similar events - such as "do you have a health spa", "do you have a gym", "do you have a pool", can safely by aggregated into "hotel facilities". Regular monitoring can detect individual sub queries rising - anything that accounts for 10% of volumen absolutely deserves a code of its own. So, for example, if "do you have a health spa" starts to form 8% of queries, perhaps separate it out into a new code and change the other to "hotel facilities ex spa". This itself is problematic as queries that span the date of code change may return unpredictable results, however, it's the best compromise and careful management of code data can save this from being an issue. "Do you have a health spa" queries rising may be information for advertising dept to consider adding "with spa" to all ads placed for the following two months to see if that reduces the quantity.

However, every so often there are calls that defy categorisation ...

A few years ago whilst carrying out a subscription telemarketing campaign for a national newspapers, the following dialogue occurred between the customer and our advisor.

Advisor: "Hi, this David calling from [National Newspaper] could I speak to Mr Customer please?"

Customer: "This is Mr Customer, what do you want?"

Advisor: "Hello Mr Customer, you have previously subscribed to our paper and I'm calling with a fantastic offer of 2 weeks free if you will take a 13 week trial. What could be better than that?"

Customer: "Hold on, are you Cold Calling?"

Advisor: "No, my name's David and I work for [National Newspaper]. We're calling all previous subscription customers with this great offer of two free weeks ..."

Customer, interrupting advisor: "Yes, you are Cold Calling!"

Advisor: "No, I'm not called Colin, my name's David ..."

And there we leave the call as there is no way back from that level of confusion. The coach listening in on the call is laughing out loud having listened to the dialogue. Fortunately, or not, call recording allowed many other people to share the joke, after the call had ended.

This example gives an insight into how customers and organisations have a different view of what constitutes a welcome telephone call and an intrusive telephone call. From a legal perspective, the customer had cancelled a previous subscription but had not requested to be removed from future communication programmes, therefore the re-solicitation programme was valid. The customer perspective, is that they have cancelled their subscription, and therefore, their association with the organisation.

It's like direct mail - if an offer arrives in the post, addressed correctly for a service or product that you are currently considering, or for something you covet, then the communication largely has value and is accepted as such - say an alternative motor insurance quote that arrives one month prior to renewal time, with all of your details correct. However, if the offer arrives, four months into your contract, with the wrong details, it's junk mail.

Like direct mail, so with telephone calls. If the call is expected and welcomed, then a positive reception awaits, if not, then there are a spectrum of possible outcomes - from mild interest through ambivilance and annoyance all the way to "screamer". That's the term for a customer who goes off on one - "he's going SAVAGE"

Tipping the odds of Successful Outcomes in your favour

1. Respect privacy and opt-out requests absolutely


2. Do not purchase data for which the provenance is unproven - there is a lot of seriously dodgy data out there - a colleague has been offered 1.9 million credit card customers, from a bank's backup system. Yes, seriously.


3. Use telemarketing discriminately, rather than blanket calling (which just doesn't work any more)


4. Get the data right. This is basic but often data used for telemarketing is poor. With so many data cleaning and enrichment options available, there is really no excuse for getting this wrong


5. Personalise the offer - make any communication talk to the specific needs, wants, motivations of the customer as an individual - "as someone who recently bought our new XTC300 Driver" rather than "as someone who is interested in golf", etc.


6. Train, train and train again. And then coach. Familiarity with material, experience of actual customer behaviour, first hand experience of the product / service do wonders for an advisor's confidence, and hence ability to engage customers.

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes