Pro Tips for Using Non-Voice Contacts in a Telemarketing Program

Great outbound telemarketing companies have spent the last decade folding chat, text, and email into their communication strategy. These non-voice contacts increase engagement with prospects and customers and give teams an instant medium to follow up and share information as part of the sales or customer care process. Here are five pro tips, hard-won from running these programs day to day.

1. Technology selection

Email, chat, and texting setups don't have to be complicated, but they deserve real research. Understand the application's abilities and limitations, how easy the dashboard is for the end user, whether tracking is proper, and how information is stored long term. Thinking through these questions up front saves real pain later.

2. Create templates

Ensuring the quality of non-voice communication is a constant challenge. Canned templates that can't be edited maintain consistency and eliminate human error. If free-form responses are unavoidable, queue them for a quality assurance review before they go out.

3. Test the applications

Test every part of the non-voice contact process before going live — understand what both the sender and receiver experience. Send templates to yourself and review for errors; for email, test across multiple email clients to see how messages render; for text, ask yourself honestly whether you'd respond to what you're reading, and adjust if not.

4. Quality assurance is critical

Just as you'd listen to live calls at program launch, your quality team should review chats, texts, and emails for proper communication, errors, and opportunities to improve. Quality control is a must for these channels to succeed.

5. Assess and make changes

A template that looks great on paper doesn't always land in a live environment. If people aren't responding to a message, it isn't working, no matter how good it looked during planning — assessing and revising quickly, even though it's time-consuming, is essential to keeping the channel effective.