Call Center Marketing Strategy Recommendations

A good call center marketing strategy can change the way your customers interact with your brand.
Call centers are often where customers first meet your brand.
Every call agent’s actions and words will, therefore, affect your brand.
Good training and internal communications are essential parts of a good marketing plan.
Boom Demand helps clients to act on solid plans for effectively using call center resources in a marketing context.

When is a call center not just a call center? Every time anyone uses it, as it turns out. Your company’s call center is more than just a complaint department or sales office. It’s the front line in the struggle to get and keep customers. Having an effective call center marketing strategy is therefore crucial to successful outcomes.

What’s a Call Center For?

Call centers have a reputation from being one of two things. One is that it’s a customer service center that people only call when they have a problem. “The product isn’t working, why? Please fix it.” That sort of thing.

The other is that it’s a sales factory, where salespeople spend all day making cold calls to try and pitch the product. This is the one that usually has the worse reputation, and the greater potential for abuse by either side.

These reputations are often the products of incomplete understanding. Customers don’t usually know what kind of work goes into making a call center successful.

But are the people running the call center helping?

That’s an important question every company needs to ask. Likewise, they need to recognize that the call center is one of the primary ways that customers experience their brand.

If that thought terrifies you, then it’s time for a reevaluation!

Brand Representatives for Every Call

Herein lies the key: whether you mean for them to do it or not, every time a customer speaks to someone associated with your brand, that interaction becomes your brand in that customer’s mind.

That means that every single customer-facing staff member you employ is a Brand Representative.

What else does that imply?

If you want your brand to be strong, you have to make sure that it’s also important to your sales and customer support staff.

That means you need to have a call center marketing strategy in place. If you don’t, your brand may slip out of your control.

If you do have one, though, you’ll soon see what a powerful way it is to boost sales and increase customer retention.

Elements of a Solid Call Center Marketing Strategy

At a minimum, your call center marketing strategy should cover two key things: agent training, and internal communications.

Agent training means that everyone on your call center team, whether in a sales or in a customer service role, should be made as familiar as possible with all of your company’s products or services.

When a customer asks a question about the basic things your company does, it should be unthinkable that an agent would have to say “I don’t know much about that.” Having to look up the solution to a very specific problem is another matter, and quite normal. Having a solid base of product knowledge, though, is a great way for every agent to become a powerful brand representative.

Internal communications, or coordination, means that sales, marketing, and customer service all work together efficiently. These three departments or functions all feed each other.

Sales teams making outbound calls need good leads. The best leads often come from carefully analyzed and curated marketing data. they can also come from the customer service department, when there’s an indication that someone might be interested in another purchase.

The key is to build or use effective CRM systems that help each department gather, analyze and act on customer data fast.

A more sophisticated call center marketing strategy will also involve deeper specialization. You can route incoming calls to exactly the right agent with the right expertise, based on where the customer is coming from and how they got to you.

To get to that point, though, you’ll need to scale up, if you haven’t already.

Call Center Marketing Strategy Building With Boom Demand

Boom Demand provides clients with powerful expertise in the area of outbound sales. We help find more customers, faster, using the most effective sales development techniques.

From our call centers, we go to where the customers are, and we guide them to you.