Note from the QVD team: This is a guest post by Nathan Teahon, Vice President of Quality Contact Solutions (QCS). Nathan and his team of outbound telemarketing managers run thousands of outbound telemarketing hours on a daily basis, both B2B and B2C. No one understands outbound telemarketing and how to get the best results than Nathan.
There is nothing more frustrating than when you have an outbound telemarketing campaign rolling along with strong performance, and then have it drop like a rock halfway through the list. It’s a helpless feeling to see your team of agents doing everything in their power to be successful and due to circumstances out of their control they can’t get anyone on the phone to talk to. Seeing the dialer going through the dreaded Spin Cycle, churning through the list and failing to find contacts makes call center managers sick to their stomachs. Also, lead lists are valuable and despite what many think, there isn’t typically an unending supply of appropriate prospects to call. How nice would it be to get your lists another 15-20% penetrated before you started to see diminishing contacts per hour?
Charities have used the power of the telephone as an effective channel to raise funds for many years. The phone is a powerful tool that gives charities a way to reach many potential donors. These calls can be made to previous donors or to those who have not previously supported the charity.
First, here is a little background. Businesses are increasingly using texting to communicate with current customer and prospects. One of the primary ways that businesses send and receive text messages is by enabling their landline to send and receive text messages. In short it’s called landline texting for business. Yes, you can text to landline!
On August 1, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a press release stating it would begin using consumer compliants to ramp-up its efforts in stamping out illegal robocalls. According to the FTC, unwanted and illegal robocalls are a persistent problem for consumers, providers, and the FTC, with over 1.9 million consumer complaints filed in the first five months of 2017.
In the beginning, there were phone calls. Then there were call centers to handle those phone calls. More recently, businesses found that customers and prospects prefer to communicate with businesses through different channels, other than a phone call. Call centers now became contact centers and the single channel strategy was replaced by multichannel. First came email, followed by chat, social media and more recently, video calls. So what is missing with this strategy? Texting.
I am writing this today to give my customers and prospects a fighting chance when I’m on a roll and rambling on to explain how Caller ID works, for example. It’s easy for me to forget that not everyone knows the QVD lingo. I find myself answering the same questions on certain terms I’m using day in and day out. To help clear that up, I put together this QVD Glossary of Terms. I’ll gladly explain these in conversation as well, but if you use this reference, maybe it won’t seem as if I’m speaking a foreign language. 
By Kelsey Olsen, Director of Enhanced Telecom Services