How many times have you been contacted by telemarketers? There are those who suggest you new offers and advantageous rates if you are already customers of their company, and there are those who offer you to become their customers, if you are currently customers of other operators. Have you ever wondered how they manage to be so loose and ready in their speech and how they manage to have the answer to all your questions or objections? Well yes, they do tests! Today we tell you how it works.

Qualitative telephone interviews to test commercial offers

Recently Testpoint carried out test interviews, simulations, to test the clarity and effectiveness of the speech that the telemarketers of a well-known telephone company propose to customers.

There were 10 “in depth” qualitative telephone interviews that the moderator conducted following a specially designed discussion guide.

The guide reproduces in all respects the speech that the telemarketer proposes to the customer and, through questions to which the respondent must answer in a broad and free way, aims to understand their point of view and the reasons that lead to the purchase choice.

The moderator pretended to be a telemarketing agent with the aim of evaluating not the commercial offer and the interest that this can arouse in the customer but the validity of the telephone approach and customer feedback.

The work, as always, starts with “recruitment“: that is, it involves selecting people with the right requisites to be able to participate in the job (in this case they had to be holders of a telephone contract and responsible within the family of the choices for what concerns telephony, a right mix of men and women and residents in different cities of Italy).

The interview was quite demanding, lasting about an hour, and there was an incentive for the participants.

All the interviews were recorded in order to be able to compare the opinions expressed by the different respondents and then proceed with the analysis and reporting.

How the interviews were carried out

Let’s ask the moderator who conducted the interviews to tell us about her experience. This is Laura 34, from Milan.

“For this job, I had to put on the shoes of the telemarketing operator of a well-known telephone Company who turns to the customer to submit new offers. The goal of my work was to find out how the customer reacts to the operator’s speech, if the speech, as it is, arouses interest, if the offers immediately appear interesting and advantageous, or if, on the contrary, the proposals arouse doubts and perplexities, if the customer exposes objections, if the speech is tiring and boring to follow. In other words, what we were interested in was capturing customer feedback.
These were not the usual 10-minute interviews in which the respondent has to answer by choosing from predefined answers and giving scores from 1 to 5. The in-depth interviews are real conversations in which there is a guide to follow but which must be used in such a way as to stimulate the respondent to analyze in depth the reasons that guide them in their choice.
I must say that the participants followed with interest, providing a lot of interesting feedback to work on”.