By Jim Beuoy, Director QA & Corporate Compliance, OKS-Ameridial Worldwide
Bad leads are costly….Have you ever calculated the costs of sending a sales rep out on a bad telemarketing lead? Add up the marketing dollars that you spent on lead generation such as campaign planning, target market selection, list rental(s), creative script writing, training the agents who cold call and qualify, role-playing, coaching, and so on. Then try to put a figure on the all of the costs associated with the sales rep following up. Don’t forget to include full (hourly) overhead burden, including benefits, office space, and so on of both the sales rep and the lead generation group. Was travel involved? Even if the sales rep only contacts the “qualified” prospect by phone, you’ll find that the total cost of following up on a lead is not insignificant. Not to mention opportunity costs. Whatever number you arrive at, it won’t take more than a couple of seconds to recognize that you simply cannot afford to allow bad leads to slip through your lead generation process.
Bad sales are even MORE costly….Now, if you think that you can’t afford to have bad leads slip through, your system you REALLY can’t afford to have bad telemarketing sales slip through! With all the renewed, state and federal focus on consumer fraud, chances are that too many complaints of unauthorized billing will land you directly in the cross-hairs of consumer protection enforcement. Assuming that you prove that “slammed” sales / leads were due to one bad apple on our team or that unauthorized charges were the result of error and that you came out unscathed from an investigation, consider the damage to the brand. That kind of publicity can have a lasting impact. Regardless of the outcome, defending yourself against such claims can be enormously expensive.
Negative Option Sales demand verification….One-time sales are risk enough but if your product or service involves a negative option (whereby product is automatically shipped and billed until the consumer takes some steps to cancel the “subscription”) then your exposure to risk is heightened significantly. Throw in a free introductory offer to your product / service and you have a classic scenario that causes concern on the part of legislators and enforcement authorities alike. Every Compliance Officer will tell you that free-to-pay-conversion, negative option sales MUST be verified.
Regardless of whether or not your offer involves a negative option, it should be obvious by now that you need to verify leads and/or sales. Some may think that the cost of quality is too high, but that thought is often arrived at by not including all of those hidden costs. If we add up all of the previously mentioned costs, we should have a good starting point for a budget. Since there is more risk involved with a bad sale than there is with a bad lead, this article will discuss verification options in terms of sales. It will be a little easier to discuss virtues of alternative approaches without the baggage of waffling back and forth between sales and leads. We’ll also talk about why it’s important that the verifier be a third party verification.
What verification methodology should you use….Obviously, we’ll need to find a verification methodology that both is appropriate for the size of the program and one that ensures that the cost of prevention isn’t more expensive than the cure. The most commonly deployed approaches are: 1) Immediate Verification, 2) Call-back Verification, and 3) Recorded Verification. Let’s weigh the pro-s and con’s of each.
Immediate Verification….Immediate verification typically involves the telemarketing agent raising his or her hand for a Supervisor or Verifier to run over, take over the conversation, to verify the decision. Just to keep things honest, the verifier adds some security or confirmation code to the record. With more recent technology, the Supervisor / Verifier can barge in (remotely) to verify the sale / lead instead of running over and taking over the agent’s handset. In other environments, the agent transfers the call to the verifier. Regardless of how the verifier joins in on the call, the agent is still required to signal or find someone to talk with the prospect - in real time. If you’ve ever witnessed this approach, you can attest that it results in the appearance of pandemonium. People are standing up, frantically waiving and verifiers are running about the call center floor, trying to verify and answer questions at the same time.
Think too about how the consumer feels while this is happening. The consumer is sitting there waiting to tell someone else: “yes, I REALLY do want to give you my money.” Probably less than the ideal consumer experience.
On the positive side, you get 100% verification. Other approaches may dictate that you settle for a statistically valid sample, but immediate verification all but insures contact with each customer. Plus, it saves the expense of sending through a “bad” sale only to spend more time and money on stopping the order from being fulfilled. Think through the logistics of stopping an order after the sale has been submitted. Adjusting reports. Adjusting commissions. Speaking of which, agents know whether or not they earned a commission (and you don’t have the baggage of dealing with charge-backs) when you verify immediately.
Immediate verification allows you to fulfill orders as just as fast as your back-office procedures can process them. Faster shipping culminates in improved cash flow. It may also be an appropriate choice when there are very few sales per hour. You probably won’t want to invest in outsourcing verification to a third party if you only get a sale every other hour. Several sales per hour, translating into hundreds of sales per day is a different matter.
Call-back verification…. Compared to immediate verification, call-back verification typically results in a lower percentage of confirmed sales. As the name implies, this process involves a follow-up phone call to the buyer. With today’s hectic lifestyles, a second contact (hopefully in a fairly short period of time) is another challenge to the sales process. Even when you try to establish a specific time for the verification or you try to call back around the same time of day as the original contact, you’ll find that this approach typically takes several attempts to make a contact. Even with a reasonable number of attempts, residential verification contact rates often fall below 85%. As if an additional contact isn’t challenge enough, right-party contacts can cause additional drops. Spouses, other family members, or co-habitants occasionally want to know the purpose of the call, raise additional questions or objections, and in some cases make a request for no further contact.
One the plus side, this approach offers another touch point. Consequently, it can be the preferred methodology in situations where you want to cultivate a personal relationship. Recruiting volunteers for a charity may be a good example. That extra touch point helps emphasis the importance of the mission and stimulates the volunteers to fulfil their pledge / assignment.
It may also be appropriate in scenarios where there can be a high level of buyer’s remorse. Verifiers can be trained to re-emphasis benefits, offer reassurances of a good decision, or at least save against sending out undesired shipments. If you really prefer this approach, just be sure to include a contingency plan for repeat buyers who tell your agent: “please don’t have them call me to confirm!” It happens more often than you think.
Methodology recommendation….Of the three approaches, recorded verification is the least intrusive for the consumer. The other two approaches may be viewed as making your customer prove that they want to buy from you. Plus, situations like the ones discussed above can go wrong during verification. Additionally, verifiers may need as much, if not more, training than the sales agent. They may be called upon to save cancels. They may not be able to lean the scope of the project from the sales rep training kit. You may need to make the investment in an additional training kit specific to their challenges and objectives.
Assuming that you have volume and continuity, there really is a better way. Most companies already have recording capabilities in place for quality assurance purposes. Most companies also send the data records somewhere for fulfillment purposes. A simplistic model for recorded verification is to export / post the data and the recordings to a secure FTP site, allow the verifiers to listen to the recordings overnight, and have verified sales / verified leads back the next morning! A version of this process has been in use for at least since the late 70’s. It’s just that digital recording has speeded up the process and has replaced cassette tapes along with all of the label and library baggage associated with handling physical media.
Recorded verification is less intrusive and less burdensome for the consumer. Furthermore, it can be more objective than the other two approaches. Verifiers can’t help but have some pressure and emotional stake in direct conversation with the buyer. Recorded verification can be set up much like quality assurance scores; where the absence or presence of the criteria – rather than the verifier determines the validity of the sale!
Leverage the experience of an outsourcer….Obviously, no export is involved when the verification function takes place in-house. However, grading your own papers (so to speak) is rarely advisable. . Outsourcing to a Third Party Verification (often referred to as 3PV or TPV) will not only add legitimacy, avoiding any appearance of bias, but it should give you healthy savings. An experienced outsourcer should be able to provide this service at a cost less than what you can attain in-house, plus you’ll benefit from their experience - avoid learning the mistakes that they’ve already overcome.