It is not an exaggeration to say that the telephone has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. The speed of communicating by phone and the ability to reach the exact person we want to speak with have drastically changed the way business is conducted over the past one hundred years. This applies to all of the areas of business - investing, growing, buying, and selling.
Business activities and theories of business practice have also developed over the past century to the point where business administration is now a serious academic pursuit. One of these businesses that has developed and continues to grow is marketing, which involves finding the most likely customers for a product or service and then targeting that customer for sales and other business activity. Marketing has boomed in the years since World War II and continues to grow as companies look for ways to expand their customer base. One of the most important activities in marketing is telemarketing, or the use of phone calls to find out more about potential customers, to stay in touch with current customers, to stay in touch with current customers, and to keep consumers informed of the advantages of a particular produce or service.
In a telecom career of a telemarketer, there is generally work for two different types of businesses. Some telemarketers are part of the in-house staff of a company or corporation, and all their calls are made or taken on behalf of that company. Others work for telemarketing service agencies and make or receive their calls for the clients of the agency. Agencies are useful for companies that don’t want to or can’t keep a full-time telemarketing staff on the payroll, or that need telemarketing services only intermittently. Both large corporations and small firms employ telemarketing agencies, which sometimes specialize in certain fields such as fundraising, product sales, insurance, or finance.
Whether working for a company or telemarketing agency, telemarketers are responsible for handling incoming calls and placing calls to outside numbers. Incoming calls might include requests for information or an order for a product that has been advertised on television, through direct mail marketing or in catalogs. Telemarketers also staff the phones that handle toll-free, for instance, on which customers can ask questions about the use of a product or make complaints. Airline reservations, concert and sport tickets, and credit card problems can all be taken care of by telemarketers. Newspapers often employ classified ad clerks to transcribe classified ads from callers. A person whose sole job is taking orders from callers over the phone is called an order clerk.
Part of their telecommunication jobs, telemarketers make outside calls for a great number of purposes as well. One of their most important jobs is to sell products and services to consumers. The names of the people they call may come from a prepared list of previous customers, the phone book, reply cards from magazines, a list purchased from another source, or randomly dialed “cold calls.” Once made, these calls often serve as a source of leads for the regular sales staff of a company. A wide range of products can be successfully sold in this way, everything from newspaper subscriptions and aluminum siding to charity fund drive contributions.
Cultural organizations such as ballet and opera companies, public television, and theater companies use telemarketers to solicit subscriptions and to get donations. Fundraising relies heavily on telemarketing. Telemarketers place outbound calls for other reasons besides selling. They may conduct marketing surveys among consumers to find out the reasons behind their buying habits, or what they like and dislike about a certain product. They may call to endorse a candidate in an upcoming election or to tell citizens about an important vote in their city council.
In their jobs in telecommunications, when making calls business-to-business, telemarketers may try to solicit attendance at important meetings, assist a company in recruiting and job placement, or collect demographic information for use in a advertising campaign. Once the sale is made, the telemarketer will enter it into a computer or fill out a form, so that the order fillers can get the product ready for shipment. When making outbound calls, telemarketers usually work from a prepared script those words they are not allowed to change. This is especially true of market research surveys, because people need to be asked and need to respond to the exact same questions if the data from the survey is to be valid at all. Often when a customer tries to object to or turn down a sales pitch, the telemarketer will read a standard response that has been prepared to anticipate the customers’ objections.
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