Make your calls count through intelligent call planning
We are not new to receiving unwanted calls from the various marketing agents selling everything from banking products to holiday packages. This kind of cold calling to acquire new customers is simply based on a list of potential customers with hardly any planning and profiling involved. A more mature sales organization or service organization will engage a planning methodology to reach out to customers. Call Planning is an essential task in CRM strategy, where the need is to constantly reach out for a wide range of purposes including acquiring new customers, developing existing customers, after sales service calls, survey calls etc.
Traditional, manual, volume based calling is time consuming, low in efficiency and high in cost. While traditional methods could have served the purpose thus far, the data that an organization has accrued over a period of time has made it impossible to consider all parameters for planning call activity for a representative, say, for a period of one month. Organizations have spent huge amounts in storage to store ‘gazillion’ bytes of data that they have collected for a customer. Harnessing this huge amount of data requires IT solutions backed by strong strategy. Companies have realized that it is impossible to manually plan for hundreds of sales and service associates over multiple geographies. Business rules change way too often in this dynamic era and manual efforts simply can’t catch up. Absence of feedback loop doesn’t help the overall planning process either. As a result, more time is spent planning than calling.
Such organizations are looking for a solution which streamlines call planning and ensures that the business rules are always in sync with the ever changing business environment. For example, majority of the reps should be focused on acquiring new customers during the holiday season while focusing on maintenance and servicing during lean sales period. Another important consideration should be the amount (number of parameters) of customer information that can be used in planning the calls. Ability to measure post planning effectiveness is another important factor that organizations look for in a solution. In short, they expect a fast, flexible, comprehensive analytical solution.
I will be discussing in detail ways and means of addressing the above mentioned challenges with the Call planning process in the subsequent blog entries and welcome your point of view on the subject based on your experiences.
