In a past career life I was the Account Director for one of the UK’s largest pet food manufacturers.
As develpment for their database they spent a million pounds on telemarketing some of their customers. Well, I say “customers”, but it was more the pet owners rather than the end consumer of the pet food!
So, the telemarketing script. There were a number of objectives, such as ensuring pet breed, size (for dogs) and name to enable the right future marketing literature and inclusion of pet name in all the right places. We also needed to gather the reason for having the pet, which is not quite as obvious as it sounds. For example, a dog may be regarded as a part of the family or just a beast to guard the property from intruders. This “reason for ownership” helped to drive the focus on the subsequent insurance pitch to the consumer. For a guard dog; “imagine how much it would cost you if your dog were ill” and for a family pet: “imagine how you’d feel if your dog were ill”. You get the gist.
In gathering the pet name it was important that the telemarketer follow the answer with an “aaaaaah.” i.e,
- “what is your pet’s name?”
- “Tiddles”
- “Aaaaahh”
And with dogs, by way of example;
- “what is the breed of your dog?”
- “A poodle”
- “small, medium or large?”
- “Toy”
- “aaaaaaah”
But it just so happened that in gathering this marketing data one day we had a Swedish guy on the phones. His accent was a touch ‘harsher’ in a similar manner to Germanic. This is quite pertinent to the situation because no English (or French for example) person could have done this so well.
So to gather the telemarketing data the call goes like this;
- “And vot ist your dog’s name?”
- “Tyson”
- “aaaaaaaahhhh”
You couln’t have wished it!
