Using Campaigns effectively in Mekashron Call Center Software can have a fantastically large impact on your business. If you want to sell efficiently and massively increase your customer base and your sales, then learning to use Campaigns is essential.
In this section we assume that you have already:
1 - Creating Campaigns
You can start creating Campaigns within Mekashron Call Center Software almost straight away once you have entered or imported the Prospects that you wish to contact (these will be Entities in the Mekashron Call Center Software system).
Please note that you need to be logged into Mekashron as an administrator in order to set up campaigns - Telemarketing Users do not, by default, have access to the necessary functions.
You can access the screens to create or modify a campaign via the main menu:
Figure 1.1 - Accessing Campaigns from the Main Mekashron Menu
... or from the Telephone icon:
Figure 1.2 - Accessing Campaigns via the Telephone Icon on the Button Menu
As you can see there are two types of campaign that you can create via the Telephone submenu:
- Telemarketing - campaigns performed by your telesales staff, which we are looking at in this chapter.
- Voice Broadcasting - automated call telesales campaigns (see the chapter on Campaigns for information on Voice Broadcasting).
Let us use an example to work through the process of creating a campaign.
In our example, we are a Distributor of "Widgets" and we have a number of clients on our database that we want to telephone with a special time limited offer for Red Widgets.
First, we will select the clients that we wish to include in the promotion. We want to choose only Clients that have bought Red Widgets in the past. It is quick and easy to filter and search to identify the clients we want. For instructions on how to do this, please refer to Search Entities.
Once we have performed our search, we have the set of clients who we want to include in this campaign:
Figure 1.3 - An Example Entity Search Result Set
We are not obliged to include all of the search results in our campaign. In our example, as we review our list we notice that there is one client contact, Amanda Martyn, whom we want to exclude from this campaign as we heard that she is on a long holiday at the moment. So we select all the other clients by putting a tick in the checkbox at the left ...
Figure 1.4 - Making Selections in the Filtered Entity List
... then we simply click on the Telephone icon to create our campaign...
Figure 1.5 - The Telephone Icon Allows you to Create a Campaign
We now are in a position to set up all the details of our campaign so that our telesales staff will be able to quickly and efficiently complete the telephone calls.
Figure 1.6 - The Telemarketing Campaign Tab
As shown above, when you access the telemarketing screen you will see that you have 3 tabs: Campaign, Script and Status.
On the first tab, we will give our campaign a name in the Campaign Name text box so that we can save it, and we will set a start time in the Schedule To field for the campaign of 9am tomorrow morning. As we want our telesales to work on this campaign urgently, because it is time-limited, we will also change the Call Priority to High - this means that our telesales staff will be prompted to make the calls for this particular campaign ahead of their day to day non-urgent campaign calls.
Figure 1.7 - Setting Basic Options for a New Telephone Campaign
Here is the full list of controls available to you on the Campaign Tab:
- Campaign - select either a new campaign and give it a name, or else select the Attach to Campaign option to modify an existing campaign - simply select it from the drop down list.
- Schedule To - Enter the date and time that you would like the campaign to commence.
- Call priority - Select from Low, Normal or High. This will determine in what order your telesales staff are prompted to work on each campaign.
- Advanced options:
- Hide history from other campaigns - select this option if you do not wish your telesales staff to see the call history from other campaigns for an entity while they are making calls for the current campaign. If you are running a series of related campaigns to the same prospects you may wish to leave this option unchecked so that your telesales staff have past historical information on other calls to this client at their fingertips while they make calls on the current campaign.
- Automatically dial next entity - selecting this option keeps your telesales staff working at top speed by dialing the next call in the campaign for them as soon as they finish the previous call.
- Rescheduled call occurs by scheduling operator - select this option if you want to ensure that a specific operator will be the one making the follow up call to the same client once he or she has spoken with them. This is important if your telesales staff have bonus incentives, as the same member of staff should be given the opportunity to call a prospect back to close a sale once he or she has established a relationship with that prospect.
- Automatically open entity on call answer - when the client which your telesales operator is calling answers the phone, Mekashron will automatically open the entity record so that your telesales operator has all the client's information in front of them during the call.
- Operators - This shows your list of users. Select those operators who will be working on this campaign.
Next, we will write a simple script for our sales staff to use for this campaign. To do this, we click on the Script tab.
On the Script tab you have the option of using an external scripting engine if you have one installed on your LAN or your PC. If you wish to use the simple scripting engine provided with Mekashron, use the default option of Use simple script engine.
Please note that to save you time you can download custom scripts from the Mekashron website, there are a selection available. If none of the available scripts meet your needs please do not hesitate to contact us as we can help! You can order scripts from Mekashron to meet your personal requirements and this can be a very efficient way of setting up your telesales operation if you are in a hurry to get selling as soon as possible.
Figure 1.8 - The Script Tab
Clicking on Add Title gives you a simple editor where you can either type in the script or else browse to and open an existing pre-recorded voice script that you have saved on your LAN or PC.
For our example we will choose to use the inbuilt Mekashron script writer, so we will leave the default option, Use simple script engine selected ...
Figure 1.9 - The Telemarketing Script Tab
... and click on the Add Title button to create a new script. This gives you the Telemarketing Script Window:
Figure 1.10 - The Telemarketing Script Window
Note that the scripting window is a cut down version of the Mekashron Editor.
We will write a simple script here and give it a title:
Figure 1.11 - An Example Script
When we are happy with our script, we click OK to save our script and exit the Script window.
The final tab, Status is where we set up statuses for campaign. For more information on managing the various statuses, please see the Create Status section earlier in this chapter.
Figure 1.12 - The Status Tab
Once we have set up all the campaign options we want, we will click OK to close the Campaign window, saving our changes.
We have created an example Campaign, and in the next section, Using the Telemarketing System we will show how a telemarketing user will now perform the work for this campaign. First, though, let us see how to add more clients (Entities) to this campaign.
2 - Adding Entities to Campaigns
Let us suppose that once we have created our campaign we look again at our entity list and remember that the client we excluded from the campaign, Amanda Martyn, has in fact already returned from her holiday and we do want to include her in this campaign after all.
To do this, simply select the checkbox next to her name, and click the Telephone icon again. Now we change the option to Attach to Campaign, and select our Red Widget Campaign from the Campaign Name drop down.
Figure 2.1 - Adding an Extra Entity to an Existing Campaign
Click OK and the additional entity has been added to the Campaign.
NOTE: Mekashron automatically checks that the entity or entities you have selected are not already included in the campaign, and does not add them twice - so you are protected against accidentally having your telesales staff call the same person twice.
4 - Summary
Now that we have seen how to set up Campaigns in your Mekashron Call Center Software, the next section in this chapter, Using telemarketing system, will show you how easy it is for your telesales team to get to work and make the calls.