Eric Holmen says Voice marketing is not your father's telemarketing. It's a well articulated pushback to my earlier rant on Phone Spam (and those of other bloggers).
Eric puts up a case for voice marketing, pointing out how tightly regulated it is, how easy to opt out, how it's for customers only. How it saves time compared to real staff calling (in the jargon, voice marketing is about automated, prerecorded messages being dropped on your telephone).
He rightly pours scorn on the many half-baked attempts at "relationship marketing" that wither in the face of WalMart's highly disciplined, cost-based strategy.
Then you realize it. Your CRM communications plan is simply noise among noise. The marketing department has turned it into a ‘traffic generating’ program, and the lofty ideals of CRM, customer dialog – they’re gone out of pure pragmatism that your business needs revenue to compete with Wal-Mart.Eric suggests that bloggers have unrealistically high expectations of relationships that WalMart's success mocks.
What I think we're looking at here is what some call the law of the excluded middle - if you're going to compete with WalMart you'd better offer something with tangibly superior service or look out. There's only so much value in the middle ground of ok value and ok service. (I think there are exceptions to this, but let's pass on that tangent for now).
Where I differ with Eric is that I suspect that voice marketing is right in that awkward middle territory, a fumbled half-baked pseudo service - and he doesn't. Eric says, come on, it's not that big a deal:
All the CEO wanted to do was tell the customers, “Thanks for shopping with us when you could have shopped somewhere else. We will do whatever we can to continue to earn your trust and your patronage.”Hmmm, if this CEO's idea of going the extra mile were to have a computer simulate an actor announcing this to me, I'd smell BS. I would infer that what the CEO really means might be 1. We'll do whatever we can on our shoestring margins and 2.I might as well be on the golf course while this actor delivers this half-truth to you. This doesn't sound much like a start of dialog to me.
But that's just me. And Eric also says
Never mind that – lets look at results. Did any blog-critics notice the startling results that voice marketing is producing? For the skeptics – did you notice the opt-out rates? A typical voice marketing message is 35 seconds long, and about 5 seconds is dedicated to giving instructions on how to opt-out. In that case – if so many consumers are offended by this, then why would only 2 tenths of one percent opt-out, consistently? And for 20% of voice marketing calls, the caller merely has to “press-1” to opt out! It doesn’t get much easier than this, and if voice marketing is so intrusive, shouldn’t the opt-out rates be at least in single, if not double digits?I'd be interested in chapter and verse on the stats, but I don't dismiss them lightly. Maybe a lot of people do at least tolerate this stuff. Weird.
Eric says
The fatal flaw of a poor marketer is letting personal experience and emotion conflict with results.I'd say that a well-functioning human (in marketing or not!) is willing to experience that conflict and not deny it. Really interesting things happen when our emotions and experience conflict with the numbers. Because, as always with numbers, they tell only part of the story.
What happens to the culture of a business that gets into low-cost, robotic ways of talking with its customers? What's it like to work for a business that relates in this way? There are always side-effects to activities that the "core numbers" don't witness.
One of the upsides of blogging is that it provides at least a back-channel for these kinds of less-measurable but still very real forms of feedback to happen.
OK, maybe voice marketing has its uses. But boy, I hope its done with way, way more panache than the rubbish I have to listen to on my phone.
So Eric, I hope we can avoid making this an either:or story. The numbers OR our feelings. Friendly people OR technology. Let's have room for both. Maybe you can share more of these statistics about how customers respond to this activity. And let's maybe see your numbers on opt-in and opt-out in a broader context of how these businesses see their relationships with customers.
(I also want to say something about scarcity-thinking vs abundant thinking, as I think that may go to the heart of what this debate is about. But I don't have time for that now... )
Bookmark: del.icio.us Digg it ma.gnolia Yahoo MyWeb Google StumbleUpon
Permalink
Facebook/Johnnie Moore
Linkedin/Johnnie Moore
Twitter/johnniemoore
Last.fm/johnniemoore
Del.icio.us/johnniemoore
Technorati/johnniemoore
MyBlogLog/JohnnieM
Blog/Johnnie Moore
Comments (5)
Is 'voice marketing' or 'voice branding' the real issue?
For brands that have a distinct personality, they seem to abandon that personality when you call their toll-free customer line. Instead of hearing the unique brand voice the company has carefully crafted, you are subjected to hearing a milquetoast, monotone, and slow-cadenced voice which sounds nothing like the brand you have come to know and appreciate.
Before brands engage in voice marketing spam, I think they should first perfect their brand's voice on their automated phone system. And who knows ... if they make their voice brand engaging enough, maybe we will not consider their telephone outreach efforts to be spam.
You can stream the 'voice brand' of companies like Starbucks, Adidas, Silicon Graphics, Whirlpool, American Express, and Viacom by going here:
http://www.top100voicebrands.com/listen.php.
February 21, 2005 14:02 Permalink for comment
Hmm. I'm don't think perfecting their voice is what I want them to worry about. I'm actually quite wary of the idea of conceptualising a single unique voice for a group of people. I prefer the variations you get from talking to individuals. As per blogging.
February 21, 2005 16:08 Permalink for comment
Fascinating couple of posts. And the link to company IVRs (voice machines) is priceless!
I have to disagree with Eric, even though I admire his contrarian thinking. When Bill Clinton "phoned me" on election day to remind me to vote, I hung up on him. I can't imagine any company I'd want to talk to more than Clinton. And even he got the brush off. Getting a fake person is WORSE than getting a real person, even when the real person is a lowly telemarketer. At least then I feel bad for them.
Reminds me of something we once did at my previous employer:
"From Man to Ape - CRM Run Amok"
http://photos3.flickr.com/5210108_bfef361f4b.jpg
February 22, 2005 02:05 Permalink for comment
Excellent responses. It's indeed a controversial medium, I can't argue with that, and when we bring in the emotional/intuitive points to the argument, there is no winning. Heck - I don't want to get an intrusive phone call, either.
Johnnie's point that the CEO felt compelled to communicate and therefore deliver computerized messages from an actor is very accurate (and humorous). The point is not that the calls are computerized, but rather that they are delivered. The question is this: is it better to have the best attempt of a communication, or no communication at all? My answer is simple - so long as customers don't run away from your communication, then it is better to make the attempt.
I'd like to think that the analogy could be made between voice marketing and Hallmark greeting cards. I'm not sure it holds up, simply because of the abusive tactics employeed by a previous generation of telemarketing bastards.
But to carry the analogy through: there must have been a time when we "adopted" greeting cards as a substitute for original, personal thought. For example, with a visit to the card store, I can purchase and deliver dozens of greeting cards without a single instance of original, personal effort or anything more than the signing of my name. This must have been an appalling development to my grandparent's generation that wrote individual letters on plain or personal stationery.
So is the issue a matter of 'true' personalization, or is voice marketing a matter of intrusion? In either case, the results remain. Consumers accept appropriate messages from appropiate parties in the appropriate context.
[By the way - as a California resident - I received the recorded calls from Arnold Schwarzenegger almost nightly during the week prior to his election, and I think it is fair to say that this is abusive and not a best practice in terms of responsible CRM. Interestingly, politicians happened to exclude themselves from the laws that corporations are required to oblige. The comparison of politicians and Bill Clinton may be true, but the context is false.]
I appreciate the open dialog and I encourage skeptics to take five minutes to check it out. We have some interesting resources at http://www.smartreply.com. You may be missing an important medium if you simply throw your hands into the air. It must mean something that the Peppers and Rogers Group took it seriously enough to document it.
Also - it's interesting to note that not only did the Peppers & Rogers Group review voice marketing, they now implement such campaigns with us monthly as reminders for their webinars. It's all about context and relevance.
Cheers.
-Eric
February 22, 2005 06:44 Permalink for comment
Thanks Eric. How nice to hear someone in your line of work talking about "telemarketing bastards".
"Context and relevance.": That would be a useful rule of thumb. It's context that tends to get stripped out in debates like this - and thanks for illustrating some.
February 22, 2005 09:30 Permalink for comment