Many companies no longer want to pay a fixed daily rate and are often attracted to companies that provide volume-based appointment setting at what seems like a very attractive price.  Whilst these providers seem to offer guaranteed 'performance' in reality customers are getting a very bad deal because the meetings provided are very poor quality because the whole business model is to get the meetings as quickly as possibly, at any cost and with anyone.  Since some campaigns are necessarily harder than others, the target has to be very high to maintain profit margins - agents can be targeted with booking 3 appointments per day.  This means that in reality the real on target, 'daily' cost of these appointments is over three times our daily rate and so represents poor value for money, particularly when many suppliers refuse to provide data or business intelligence from the calls they make.  Given our current tough economic climate it is more than important than ever to determine whether target companies really do have sufficient pain or interest that will make it likely that they will prioritise investment, when the prevailing sentiment is to batten down the hatches and restrict spending.

In general any telemarketing company that works on thin margins and provides unrealistic performance expectations to clients will be prone clients is liable to be prone to cutting corners and exhibiting unethical behaviour e.g.

• Lack of integrity - call-centres engage with competing clients and transfer leads from one client to another
• Lack of honesty - clients are promised over-inflated expectations for leads and/or meetings but do not honour their pledges
• Hands-off communication - clients have to find out about leads via a Web portal and any issues have to be directed to an Account Manager rather than the agency staff and team leaders
• Fraud - charging for time that has been spent on other clients assignments. Since clients often keep their agent's anonymous to clients this is hard for them to track
• Wasted time - client will receive an agreed number of booked appointments but recipients are coerced into agreeing to meetings, many of which fall out after the client has paid
• Poor client brand image - contacts are co-erced into meetings without any form of qualification to determine whether a meeting will be in their interests
  
• Poor calibre staff - staff are employed for the lowest possible wages and generally either lack intelligence/academic qualities and/or are employed on a temporary basis and/or lack career prospects so have no incentive to produce quality results
  
• Overly pressurized staff - many call-centres put excessive demands on their staff resulting in high levels of burnout and staff turnover. Clients therefore have to continually invest in training and never build up a presence or body of retained knowledge within the client company
  
• Lack of staff training - unbelievably many companies do not claim that it is necessary to give staff formal corporate and product training for their client assignments
  
• Poor operational environment - larger call centres have huge levels of noise which makes effective communication nigh impossible. When it is clear that a caller is from a call-centre environment contacts immediately lose interest in the call and try to disconnect as soon as possible
  
• Poor data - Many companies use out-of-date contacts information which makes it hard for staff to perform effectively (We generally recommend purchasing fresh data if suitable contacts data exists)
  
• Reliance on solely using the telephone in isolation to achieve results - companies are now adept at avoiding sales calls whether it's by screening calls, training gatekeepers, using no name policies or registering on the Telephony Preference Service. Effective lead generation means that you need to intelligently combine the use of telemarketing, email marketing, social networking sites and Google research analysis to identify and focus on the recipients that are likely to demonstrate the most interest in a particular value proposition, particularly if you are targeting a niche audience which may exist within various organisational departments.
• Misrepresentation to target contacts by staff - this can take various forms such as lying about the purpose of the call or relationship with a target contact, providing misleading information about a client or its solutions
  
• Overcalling - this will particularly be an issue if there is a short term engagement and a limited number of target contact
• Cajoling contacts to agree to meetings on the basis that they can cancel later, on the basis that many contacts will agree to get the caller off the 'phone but will forget to cancel.
• Booking appointments with overly junior staff or with contacts that have no real interest
• Failing to use barrier staff or junior staff to profile the account potential and identify the key decision making contacts