Can call blending pay off?

Many organisations with a customer-facing focus, such as banks andme strong opinions on the people issues involved in call blending. insurance companies, have been investing significantly in setting up call centres. Although in the long term, they know this will pay off due to increased customer satisfaction and operating efficiency, initially the manpower effort and financial investment involved is huge.

It is largely as a result of this huge financial investment that I believe call blending as a concept came about. In my view, call blending as a concept is being thrust on organisations by accountants and IT people.

So just what is call blending? On paper it sounds great: if you're operating a call centre, there are going to be quiet times when your staff are sitting around waiting for calls to come in. Why not get them to do some outbound calls during these times? From the accountant's point of view this maximises the investment in the personnel and the technology. It also means you don't need to have two teams of people, one making outbound calls, one taking inbound calls. From the IT manager's point of view, the technology is available to allow the same operator to switch between inbound and outbound calls, so why not?

Yet although call blending sounds great in theory, it doesn't work in reality, for a number of reasons.

Different skills

The quickest way to ruin a good outbound cold caller is to give them inbound to do. This is because the skills involved in both types of call are hugely different. People making outbound calls to prospects or customers need to be proactive. They need to control the call right from the start, and use their communication skills to probe and search the prospect, to build a profile of that person. Picking up the phone cold is difficult and the important thing is to meet the objectives of the call, which may be to make an appointment or send more information, for example.

On the other hand, telemarketeers taking inbound calls are mostly reactive.

They often already have the profile of the caller, because he or she is an existing customer. These people often need to have a sympathetic tone, and need to have the skills to diffuse a situation if the customer is experiencing a problem.

The learning curve

It's very difficult for telemarketeers to make the switch in a matter of minutes between making proactive outbound calls and taking reactive inbound calls. For this reason, I would never recommend that a big campaign should ever be broken up into units of less than one week on the same activity. Every campaign has a learning curve and it takes some time to learn the campaign and be focused on it. Switching telemarketeers between different types of campaign, inbound and outbound, really means you're asking your telemarketeer to be the proverbial jack of all trades, master of none.

Motivation

People are motivated to do a better job if they feel in control. Swapping between different types of activity makes them feel out of control. Often, the motivation to be a telemarketeer is not a career choice - it's possibly a step towards a career in sales or marketing, for example.

If they're made to struggle between two completely different types of campaign, they'll be demoralised and the results will never be as good as someone who is dedicated to that campaign. If you take a person who is naturally outgoing, controlling and has a gift for selling, and try to force them to handle a passive, reactive inbound campaign, you'll get problems. And the same is true in reverse.

That's not to say people can't make the switch,

more that they need time to do so, and shouldn't be expected to switch several times during the course of a working day.

Give it time

It's important to allow people the time to do their job properly. It's often thought that there's a lot of dead time during a telemarketing campaign and during this dead time the telemarketeers can handle some inbound calls. But you've got to remember that on an outbound campaign, although typically only four decision-making contacts per hour can be made, there are a lot more calls that need to be made to get to those four successful contacts. In between, you have to allow time for planning the call, note writing after the call, hitting dead numbers and giving and receiving feedback from colleagues who are working on the same campaign.

In conclusion then, call blending simply isn't a workable solution. You've got to decide what you want to achieve. Do you simply want to make and take as many calls as possible during the working day? Or do you want to achieve results that are going to help grow your business? If you want results, you've got to do a quality job. This means having two separate teams of people - one focusing on outbound, the other focusing on inbound - and never the twain shall meet.

If you really do have times when inbound call takers have nothing to do, give them something that's less challenging than their normal job, not more challenging.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) says that an outbound telemarketeer costs £45,000 a year, taking everything into account. Get 10 telemarketeers and it doesn't work, that's a huge lost opportunity. Get it right, and your business is transformed.

Tony Vaughan founded IT telemarketing agency Mentor in 1994. Before setting up Mentor, Tony was managing director and joint founder of the UK's first IT telemarketing agency. Tony has extensive experience as a supplier of IT telemarketing and five years experience as an 'end user' of system sales.

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