This section outlines the importance of agents or frontline staff to the future health of your business and the telemarketing industry.

The following areas are covered to enable you to understand your minimum obligations to your staff in order to meet best practice:

  • Recruitment
  • Training
  • Contracts
  • Remuneration

Key principles

  • Think long-term

The number of agent places in the UK has risen significantly over recent years. As our industry continues to expand, evidence suggests that a career in the contact centre industry is no longer seen as a stepping stone between alternative careers but for many agents is a career in its own right.

  • Provide a positive work environment that encourages growth

It is more important than ever to make sure that the training and environment you provide for your team is positive and constructive in the long-term as well as the short-term.

With further growth forecast well into the next decade, it is important for you to create a positive vision of your business, our industry and the different contact centre careers available to talented individuals.

  • Present roles honestly and fairly

When recruiting for outbound telemarketing positions, consider the way in which you present different roles to best reflect the actual work that your recruits will undertake.

 

 

Roles

For the purposes of this best practice document, the following roles are considered in scope (the list is not exhaustive):

  • Telemarketing executive
  • Telemarketer
  • Telesales executive
  • Telephone sales canvasser
  • Customer relationship telephone adviser
  • Outbound customer adviser
  • Outbound sales agent

 

 

Recruitment

  • Recruit with honesty

In order to attract and retain the best people, your recruitment process should be fair, open and honest about the nature of the role throughout – from initial advertising through to recruitment days or interviews and job offer.

  • Check latest legal requirements

Ensure that your recruitment policy complies with current employment and immigration law.

  • Include telephone interview

It usually makes sense to include a telephone interview, as a clear and professional telephone manner will be integral to the success of any candidate in an outbound telemarketing role.

  • Use one process

By their very nature, telemarketing campaigns can often be tactical and therefore you may also be recruiting people on a temporary basis on occasion. You should attempt to follow the same recruitment methodology whether for a permanent or temporary role.

  • Use reputable agencies

In the event that you are employing temporary staff, there are many reputable recruitment agencies from which to draw agents.

  • Check full references

Agents will have access to your consumer’s personal data and will be working in a privileged position, effectively entering a consumer’s home every time they conduct a telemarketing conversation.

Your organisation’s reputation (and that of your client, if you provide outsourced facilities) is in their hands. In order to ensure compliance with security of customer data, always obtain and check your recruit’s full references.

 

Contracts

  • Include full job specification

The contract of employment should include a full job specification that clearly states:

  • Job role
  • Place of work
  • Hours of work
  • Holiday entitlement
  • Sickness entitlement, if applicable
  • Disciplinary and grievance procedure
  • Remuneration, including financial and non-financial benefits
  • Review annually

Review this annually as part of your agent’s annual performance review to ensure it continues to accurately reflect the activities they are required to undertake on your behalf.

  • Clearly explain incentives

Providing full, clear information and explanation of any incentive structure, if this is an integral part of the job you are offering.

  • Agency staff contracts

For agents working via a recruitment agency, your agent’s contract of employment is with the agency itself.

 

Remuneration

A proper remuneration structure provides your best opportunity to encourage the right sort of behaviour among staff working on outbound telemarketing campaigns.

  • Pay a sufficient basic rate

Pay a basic rate of pay, whether a salary or hourly rate, that allows individuals to focus on the best interests of each and every consumer they contact in the course of their work.

  • Comply with minimum wage

Ensure that rate of pay complies with the current national minimum wage. We recommend that you should guarantee your agents a pay rate of no less than the minimum wage, irrespective of their employment status or the number of sales that they make.

  • Enforce minimum wage from agencies

We further advise that it is best practice for you to contractually enforce a basic pay rate of no less than minimum wage on the agencies you use – and actively supervise their third-party sales agents.

  • Make incentives achievable

Set incentives to achievable levels and reflect the ability to convert.

  • Incentivise good behaviour

Set team goals and individual rewards to minimise poor behaviour and maximise positive outcomes.

  • Incentivise QUALITY of customer interaction

Think about exactly what you are incentivising. Reward the QUALITY of customer interaction rather than focusing exclusively on the outcome (sale). Encouraging your agents to focus on quality is a key factor in allowing the natural conversion rate for a campaign to rise.

  • DO NOT pressure conversions

Forced conversions can often lead to cancellations and or complaints which, in turn, take business time and effort to resolve.

  • Align motivations for all staff

Ensure that your payments structure incentivised all members of the team, and all levels of management structure, towards the same behaviours and objectives.

  • Monitor against incentivising bad practice

Observe the outcomes of your commission structure to ensure that is not deliberately or inadvertently encouraging bad practice.

  • Things to avoid when remunerating sales staff:
  • Commission-only deals between agencies and clients
  • A high proportion of your telemarketer’s remuneration paid in the form of commission
  • Low levels of accountability
  • Further resources

 

 

 

Training

Telemarketing relies on great telemarketers

The performance of your telemarketing is inextricably linked to the skill of your agent making the call.

  • Offer continual training

Identify and address ongoing training and development needs within your telemarketing or contact centre environments to ensure best practice and best results. Not only will your commitment to training activities produce immediate higher business effectiveness, it will also encourage a high-performance culture that will help to grow your business in the long term.

  • Nurture staff performance as a key competitive advantage

A culture of lasting high performance and efficiency is the keystone of top organisations.

Nurture a community of engaged agents, with a clear idea of how they are performing and where they are going, to gain a pivotal differentiator between your organisation and your competitors.

Your ultimate goal is to create a culture where your staff can improve, give their best and deliver your business sustainable high performance.

  • Use training to create a successful culture

Build organisational values, hard work ethic, clear reward and a customer care ethos into the framework of your training. Well-structured training will also enable you to raise the profile of your company, your agent’s role and telemarketing generally – shaping the future of your business and our industry.

  • Deliver creative training programmes / introduce innovative telemarketing practices

Creative training programmes will help stir thought and get agents thinking, responding, contributing, and releasing creative potential with each call made.

  • Invest in training to improve profitability

Practitioners who embrace and promote training, whether accredited or not, will invariably cash in on tangible bottom line rewards. Well-trained teams naturally tend to achieve better results, leading to greater efficiencies, higher quality standards and an uplift in financial returns.

  • Provide meaningful shared vision

Delivering a clear vision and strategy that benefit ALL levels of your organisation to provide your staff with motivational shared objectives.

  • Reward employee training

Getting staff to connect with your business and buy into the idea of high performance can be tricky.

Provide real rewards for successful training and recognise employees who perform highly or make a particularly valuable contribution to your training or culture. Ensure that you are incentivising positive, quality-focused behaviour rather than poor practice or goals that might compromise customer experience.

 

Campaign training

Once you have recruited the staff required for your telemarketing needs, it is paramount that you offer a structured training programme relevant to the needs of your individual recruit – not just the specifics of the product or service you are promoting.

Your training programme should provide your telemarketer with a good understanding of:

  • The product

The fullest details of the product or service being promoted – and where these sit in the market place.

  • The organisations involved

The position of the promoted organisation in its market place.

  • Their role

Their own role in the sales process alongside other promotional materials and marketing.

  • Telemarketing good practice

How to get the best out of a telephone call with a prospect or customer in the right manner.

Typical training programme:

Hard skills

  • Product knowledge, including any terms and conditions
  • Objectives of project or campaign
  • Demographics of customers/prospects
  • Briefing on previous/current promotions, including telemarketing
  • Escalations
  • Industry guidelines, including data protection and the TPS

Soft skills

  • Listening techniques
  • Call structure
  • Strategies for dealing with different customer types
  • Handling complaints
  • Updating customer records

Key training goals

  • Empower your staff

The key is to empower your front-line staff to understand and respond to any query from a prospect or customer, including how to handle a complaint. This in turn should reassure consumers and help to positively change the perception of our industry as a whole.

  • Scale training to task

The level of training you need to undertake will be proportionate to the amount of information appropriate to the product or service being promoted.

  • Consider staff knowledge levels

Consider the telemarketing experience – including both good and bad habits – of the labour pool from which you recruit.

  • Take advantage of qualification schemes

There are a number of schemes to consider for the development of your staff at all levels, such as:

  • Train to Gain – basic literacy and maths programme funded by the DTI
  • NVQs – Institute of Customer Service
  • Give staff portable skills

Both the above provide portable qualifications that your member of staff can take with them as their career progresses.

  • Promote industry reputation

Best practice dictates that you safeguard the future of our industry by providing the highest level and quality of training that your organisation’s resources will allow.

 

Accredited training schemes

  • Offer accredited training

Offer training that is linked to some form of accreditation.

This can offer faster payback on your investment as your staff are better incentivised to learn when extra qualifications are at stake, leading to obvious performance benefits to your organisation.

  • Recognise that accredited training attracts good staff

Equally, accredited learning can help you attract and retain the best staff.

Offer your staff the opportunity for practical work-based learning to both raise their competency levels and help them in their career path.

  • Accredited qualifications emphasise measureable improvement

Accredited learning programmes are fundamentally different to training because they place far more emphasis on the individual learner and the measurable change in their performance as a result.

  • Measure key competencies

These programmes communicate with learners by breaking key competencies or skill sets down so they are measured and scored by certain written and shared standards.

For example, a task such as ‘opening a call’ might be scored on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being lowest and 5 highest:

  1. Below expectation – Agent did not properly announce the call, failed to check they had the correct person, spoke unclearly, provided inaccurate information.
  2. Exceeded expectation – Agent used customer’s first and last name, communicated call objective well, immediately generated interest and went on to progress the call.

Feedback and continued development are features of this method of learning.

  • Accredited training improves business performance

Accredited learning programmes in the workplace help place stronger focus on business performance, enabling higher levels of employee engagement and better business results.

  • Offer ongoing training

The best training programmes are those that never stop happening and are linked to daily activities like your company intranet, call logging systems, morning meetings, individual feedback and so on.

  • Accredited schemes available

There are several kinds of accredited learning programmes available.

These are usually work-based and can take the form of practical assignments, workplace assessments, coursework, college courses or apprenticeships, depending on the type of qualification and the awarding body.

National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs)

NVQs are recognised competency-based qualifications acknowledging proficiency in a particular occupation or task.

An NVQ is roughly equivalent to a GCSE so are ideal for those who wish to extend their qualifications.

They are based and evidenced on workplace activities, not coursework or exams.

NVQs are not necessarily dedicated to learning new skills but are typically focused on raising and recognising competence in an existing role.

 

BTEC

BTEC is one of a small number of exam boards that offer a standalone qualification.

A BTEC, like an NVQ, is an occupational qualification, but comparable to an A Level.

BTECs are designed to help learners progress in their career, learning new skills and increasing their competence in new tasks aimed towards a certain job.

Other awarding bodies or exam boards that offer similar qualifications include OCR and AQA.

Corporate training programmes

Some organisations run their own custom training scheme, developed in line with the specific needs of the business. These may not have a recognised qualification but are valuable in that they are ongoing and will have a regular systematic framework.

These programmes are based on key competencies required for specific jobs and are linked to individual learning plans tailored to each individual. They break down performance to sets of competencies and set clear measurement objectives for each.