Monthly Archives: May 2015

Telesales or Telemarketing: Do You Know The Difference?

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Find out the difference between telemarketing and telesales and how it can impact your business. 

When it comes to Telesales and Telemarketing, most people do not know the difference. However, both these services are unique and can offer distinct values to every business. If you wish to get the most out of your telephone campaign, understanding the differences and finding out how they can be employed can help your business.

Industry experts use the term “Telemarketing” to refer to all the activities that employ the telephone to connect with prospective customers. Making a customer aware of a product/service, generating leads, offering information, conducting market research, canvassing established customers and selling products/services are all a part of telemarketing. In fact, telemarketing is a blanket term that even includes telesales and other areas.

When you are looking to use one of the two for your business, you must keep the following key distinctions in your mind:

Telemarketing: A service that creates interest, generates opportunities, offers information, makes appointments, avails customer feedback and produces leads over the telephone.

Telesales: A service that directly sells your services/products to a prospective customer over the telephone.

Now that you are aware of the differences between the two activities, you can choose which service to use. The choice you make will depend upon the results that you wish to gain. Continue reading →

Seven Business Enhancing Benefits of Using Market Research

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Wondering how market research can help your business? Here are seven business enhancing benefits that only market research can help you with.

Do you know your market? If yes, do you have an insight of what your target audience wants and needs are? Instead of guessing and making vague estimates, you can now plan out all your marketing activities through market research.

Your enterprise may have a huge pile of data coming in from different sources, but that would mean nothing, if you do not analyze it thoroughly. By researching your market, you can go one step ahead and gain an advantage over your competitors.

Market research is systematic and objective collection and evaluation of data about your business environment, goals, competition and target market. Market research can increase your understanding of the factors that affect your business. However, market research is not a one-time activity as most people assume. In fact, it should be an ongoing cycle, if you really wish to benefit from it.

The information that market research can provide you with is indeed outstanding. The findings from market research can not only guide you while making important decisions, but also help you benefit from a value that will exceed the cost you have spent on research.

Here are the top seven benefits of market research:

1. Enhances your communication with present and prospective customers

With your research results in hand, you can formulate the most effective way to reach out to your consumers. You will understand more about their likes/dislikes and you can tailor your services to meet their needs.

2. Identify new opportunities in the marketplace

Research will show you if a new product may not be what your target market wants or needs. You can then make appropriate modifications to suit your audience’s preferences or come up with a different product.

3. Reduce business risks

With the aid of market research you can decide if you should take action on a particular subject. For instance, the specific location, where you wished to open a shop may already have a saturated market. Such information can stop you making such a decision and help you look out for an appropriate location.

4. Measure your business against competitors

It is always a good thing to measure your enterprise against competitors. Market research can point out where you are in a competitive market, thereby helping you to take action and move ahead of your competition. Continue reading →

Why Use A Remote Bookkeeper For Your Business?

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Remote bookkeeping can provide you with significant cost savings, 24/7 availability of bookkeepers, regular data back-up and freedom to focus on your business.

With technology making new advancements, more and more businesses are now considering remote bookkeeping services. For some companies, the idea of a virtual bookkeeper is scary and new, while others feel that bookkeeping will not work for them. However, these are myths. As soon as an organization tries out virtual bookkeeping, they are quick to realize the benefits of remote bookkeeping services.

Here are some of the advantages of using a virtual bookkeeper for your business.

Significant Cost Savings

Remote bookkeeping can put you touch with an expert bookkeeper at half the amount that you currently pay to your in-house bookkeeper. Since a virtual bookkeeper works remotely, he/she will be able to offer part-time accounting services that will be meet the needs of your small business. In addition to this, you will not have to pay for vacations, payroll taxes and other such benefits.

Since remote bookkeepers are experienced and talented, you will not have to deal with any errors. Choose a service provider that has several clients, a great team of bookkeepers and established services.  Such a vendor will not only help you enjoy significant cost savings, but also put you in touch with an efficient team.

24/7 Availability of Bookkeepers

Unlike an in-house bookkeeper, a remote bookkeeper is flexible and will always be available to match your scheduling. You can also avail constant customer support, even after office hours. In fact, a remote bookkeeper will work at your convenience. Whether you require bookkeeping in the morning, evening or on weekends, a remote bookkeeper will always be able to assist you. With outsourcing, vacation and sick days do not exist. Even if a bookkeeper is on leave or sick, your service provider will provide you with additional bookkeepers, to keep your business running seamlessly. Continue reading →

5 Popularly Outsourced Call Center Services

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Do you want to outsource call center services, but do know which ones to outsource? Here is list of the 5 popularly outsourced call center services to help you decide.

Customer support services can either be inbound (where a customer calls to resolve their issues, register complaints or avail more information) or it can be outbound (where call center agents call prospective customers to sell products/services to get feedback or to conduct a survey).

Call center services, being a niche field, requires skilled customer support executives, a large infrastructure and cutting-edge calling technology. All this can be very expensive, not to mention the huge amount of time and energy that has to be invested.  This is why companies prefer outsourcing call center services, so that they can focus more on their core business ventures.

When outsourcing call center services, you can choose to outsource either inbound or outbound services.  Here are the five customer support services that most companies opt to outsource.

1. Lead Generation Services

The process of making calls to a database of people and finding out how many are interested in a company’s products/services is known as lead generation. This service is pre-requisite for good sales and is one of the most popular call center services. If a person is interested, he/she would become a qualified lead and such leads would be handed over to the sales department of the company for a follow-up.

2. Appointment Setting

Appointment setting, another popular call center service revolves around calling up prospective candidates who are shortlisted through a lead generation process. Next, an appointment is set up with the customer’s company sales representative. Outsourcing this service can help you save both effort and time.

3. Third Party Collections

This is yet another call center service that several banks and financial institutions opt for. Through third party collections a financial institution can recover their money from their debtors. The call center provider is paid a commission based on the amount of money they are able to recover. Continue reading →

Improve Quality & Eliminate Errors Through Data Enrichment

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How do you optimize the potency of your database and catapult your sales and marketing efforts? The answer to this question is Data Enrichment Services.

Have you invested a lot of time and money into processing your database, but have still not been able to make sense out of your data? This is a problem that most organizations face, when dealing with inaccurate data. How do you optimize the potency of your database and catapult your sales and marketing efforts? The answer to this question is Data Enrichment Services.

If your business belongs to the insurance, banking, telecommunications or retail industry, you will know that the quality of data is critical and can have a direct impact on your company/ Investing in data enrichment services from India can help you accurately organize, format, modify, classify, replace, delete or correct information gathered across data fields.

Data enrichment is a niche field, where trained data experts will rectify any type of irregularity in your data and make your data more effective. By refining your database, you can come up with targeted sales and formulate direct marketing campaigns. An outsourced service provider like Outsource2india can update old or obsolete data with new information, conduct referential integrity checks, organize mailing lists, use consistent attribute names and develop homogenous pools of data.

In data scrubbing, specialized tools are used to carefully examine a database for flaws. Various algorithms, rules and look-up tables are used to correct different types of errors. For instance, finding out duplicate records or adding missing zip codes can be achieved through the use of database enrichment tools.

When to use data enrichment?

  • Your data is gathered from different sources, and you are left with data in inconsistent formats that cannot be evaluated or used
  • Your current data has several inaccurate/duplicate records and incomplete descriptions
  • You require data from external sources in order to complete your database and enhance its quality
  • You want to improve the accuracy of your customer data

Continue reading →