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Telemarketing – an interesting insight!
Working in different geographies means being able to stay in touch.
Neha is from Stanchart (or so she claims, as most outsourced operatives do) and wants to know if I want a draft on loan. Seema is from Citibank, Chennai. She wants me to take a Diner's Card. Never mind that I have one now for the past 20 years.
I get an average of six calls every waking day. Someone either wants me to own that "absolutely amazing timeshare" in Timbuktu, or it is my time to be "the lucky winner of an experience of a lifetime". I am tired of all this.
The Supreme Court's mention on telemarketing in response to the public interest litigation filed on the subject is the ultimate recognition of this menace. It's time to put a stop to it and get going with processes that seek to protect the privacy of the consumer. I am a marketer at heart but my soul is that of a consumer. Each of us is a marketer and a consumer at the same time. The consumer in me cries out to stop this menace.
Let's remember that marketers who think like the consumer does are more in touch with reality than the ones who get carried away by the potential of the medium of telemarketing altogether. Let's look at some of the issues. Marketing evolves. But it must evolve with the consumer's want and need.
Just as the consumer have wants and needs in the realm of products and services that they want to use and partake of, they are also are capable of expressing their needs, wants, desires and aspirations of how they want to be communicated to.
Ask the savvy consumer in the marketplace. If the marketer can be a savvy entity by the process of his education in the realm of marketing and his diverse experiences, the consumer is savvy as well. She has been marketed-to for a long time.
The savvy consumer is fed up of the way she is spoken to. The communication has been top-down for far too long and the marketer is just about waking up to communicating at level terms with the consumer.
A time will come when the marketer will communicate bottom-up and the consumer is really begged to, to buy. Today, however, the consumer is tired of the calls that pester than placate a need and want.
We started in the good old days by marketing 1:1. Selling, marketing and advertising happened one-on-one. When this became difficult, marketing assumed the easier and more practicable route of going 1: many. Here, mass media like television played a big role.
While branding seems to work here, nothing else does. Mass marketing is too mass-driven. Wanting to solve this problem, direct marketing of the 1:1 kind happened in many markets of the developed world. Direct marketing such as the mailer kind happened. And so did telemarketing. And both killed the goose that had the potential of laying the golden egg, by insensitive and rampant use.
Telemarketing is an excellent tool if used sensitively and with caution. Marketing is, however, a democracy. It is exploited by everyone till consumers cry out in pain to stop. Direct marketing of the insensitive-mailer kind had the US market scream in pain. And telemarketing had the US, Europe, the UK and Japan scream in anger.
The kind of telemarketing we practice in India is insensitive and intolerable. I believe this is the time to put an end to it. We need a national register of "Do not call" numbers. And if Sneha still calls, it's time to claim that $11,000 compensation from the insensitive company she represents.
Let's remember, the onus to find out which is a DNC number lies with the court of the telemarketer. |
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