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you are here: Home > Clients > Business Link

About Business Link in London

Business Link in London is a publicly funded body, providing a free service for small or medium sized business. The service, delivered by Serco, offers high quality information and practical advice to help business people tackle their challenges directly or with further expert assistance.

Business Link’s  goal is to help people look at business issues objectively and connect them to the right specialist advice or support to meet particular needs. The service is impartial, free and available 24 hours a day through a telephone enquiry line and comprehensive website.

Project background

Business Link In London had a number of requirements for outbound calling services. These requirements included:

• Cleansing, updating and profiling of a database of tens of thousands of business records (including the capture of sensitive demographic information, including race, gender and disability status)
• The generation of high quality leads for Business Link in London’s business review and intensive assist services
• The generating qualified opt-in email regisitrations for Business Link in London’s digital marketing communications

Since early 2008, The Telemarketing Company has provided a wide range of services to address these needs. The calling projects have ranged in scale from as few as 500 records up to 60,000 and included both long term, strategic campaigns and ad-hoc, short notice tactical projects.

Prior to the launch of each project or campaign a detailed plan was agreed and documented to include the following key areas: scripting, questionnaire design, data quotas and requirements, email collateral use, regular data feeds of leads generated and quality assurance and eligibility criteria. 

Project execution and results

The various projects and campaigns have all been executed using the Telemarketing Company’s Research Team. This dedicated team comprises of full time, trained and salaried specialist callers and managers trained using the Market Research Society’s Accredited Interviewer Training Scheme.

Datasets were segmented as required prior to calling, to allow quota management and granular reporting and analysis. Scripts were designed from an initial brief and these scripts were regularly reviewed during the campaign in order to optimise results and data integrity.

All calls were recorded and held securely in The Telemarketing Company’s in-house 16 million call archive. As with all campaigns, frequent reference was made to the call recordings on an ongoing basis to provide insight, quality assurance and coaching indicators. Given the sensitivity of some of the personal information being captured the guaranteed availability of all call recordings was an important consideration for Business Link in London.

All email addresses captured were validated using The Telemarketing Company’s proprietary process and any email addresses that failed QA were rechecked, delivering a very high level of accuracy amongst the tens of thousands of individual email addresses captured.

For each project, an initial face to face briefing for the calling team was delivered by The Telemarketing Company. In addition, ad-hoc training days have been agreed as required, where Business Link personnel have spent time on site with the teams to provide coaching support.

When generating leads, a detailed and unscripted discussion was required with the business owner to provide insight into owners’ perceptions of their main opportunities for growth, their current planning or review process and what they felt were the main issues they were facing that was preventing them from growing. Thousands of leads and email sign ups were gathered across the course of these campaigns.

Client Testimonial

Business Link in London has worked with the Telemarketing Company for a number of years, most recently on a new campaign as part of our new service model. This required us to focus efforts on a much harder to reach target audience, that of the larger SME (Small and Medium Sized Enterprise) with 5 employees or more. This group has always been more difficult for Business Link to connect with, but TTMC have been successful in delivering both leads and tailored information packs to target throughout the campaign.

The Telemarketing Company are flexible and understand the issues we faced in delivering the new focus. They were always happy to meet us to review scripts and approaches, making positive contributions to how the campaign and their performance could be improved. The quality and effectiveness of their work means that we have no hesitation in recommending them.  

Marketing and Communications Director

Business Link in London