As I was walking around this past Affiliate Summit, I couldn't help but notice companies looking to buy call center generated leads. Then listening to whispers throughout the show, it seems there was none less than a half dozen call center companies floating around attempting to sell their wares, yours truly included. It seems telemarketing is back in vogue.
Back in 2002, when we started using telemarketing as a lead generation channel, it was a foreign concept to most people in the industry. We did some of the first live transfer campaigns from India and built a solid business in the mortgage lead generation industry. January 1, 2005 marked a day that will forever live in infamy in the telemarketing business - as that was the first that National Do Not Call List went into effect and tens of millions of people around the country blacklisted themselves from our dialing. The entire industry went into a tailspin after that and many of the call centers in the US closed down. Overseas ones survived but became a lot less profitable. I even sold my company and left the industry.
Fast forward to 2010 and it seems every affiliate network and lead generator has been pitched live call transfers, hot transfers, warm transfers or some form of telemarketing verified lead. One affiliate manager mentioned she was pitched 20-30 times in the last month alone by call centers. Why the sudden interest in telemarketing? I have 2 theories.
One reason is based around outbound and the other around the voice industry as a whole. The Do Not Call List put many call centers out of business over the last 5 years so despite the fact that the DNC is getting larger, there are less people dialing, so it is profitable again. A lot of the clients who were buying leads generated overseas also phased it out due to the price increasing to the point of being about the same as onshore or internet generated leads and thus the incentive to outsource to India has significantly dropped. Yes, it's true, Indian and outsourced generated leads tend to close at lower closing rates than US generated leads. Now that the price differential nearly disappeared, their appeal has been disappearing as well. Thus there is less competition and now new US call centers are getting back into the game.
The second reason why call centers are in vogue is that the voice channel overall has gotten hot. Both CJ & Linkshare are developing out voice programs where they can track phone numbers associated with the ads to the affiliate. It seems now that ecommerce is 15 years old, people like to call in to request information and place orders again. Now that there is tracking associated with these dial-ins and clients are getting comfortable accepting calls, it opens up a whole new world of lead generation possibilities.
Overall, I think voice generated leads are going to be the hot topic of 2010 and call centers will make a resurgence as a prime mechanism for lead generation.
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