Association Membership Retention is Improved by Phone
By Heather Dubas, Senior Operations Manager, Quality Contact Solutions
The primary goal of every company that is offering a product or service is to sell as much of that product or service as you possibly can. Once you sell that product or service, retaining those customers is key for repeat business and referrals. This goal is no different for associations that offer memberships to potential members. Quality Contact Solutions has been helping associations with membership retention with specialized membership retention and renewal telemarketing campaigns for years and we are gaining even more momentum in 2017.
Put Me In Coach
We partner with many types of associations that offer memberships. Some examples are human resources, automotive/fleet, aviation and baseball coaches. The baseball coaches association telemarketing renewal campaign was one that I wanted to be a part of as soon as I heard about it. Baseball is close to my heart and I spend most springs and summers at the diamond watching my boys on the field and behind the plate. This particular association had never utilized an outsourced telemarketing resource. They had always done their membership renewals internally and it took a tremendous amount of manpower and time. When you have over 7,000 memberships to renew each year as well as recruiting new members, help is needed and that is where QCS comes in with our expertise in placing highly effective outbound telemarketing calls to lapsed members or members that are about to expire.
Drafting a Successful Team
QCS has many different types of call center agent teams, each team is geared towards certain types of calls. We are very lucky to have a few teams that are very good at association telemarketing and membership renewal telemarketing. Telemarketing is not an easy job and it takes a certain person to succeed at it. QCS has a motto that we stick with no matter what—we will not engage in a campaign unless we feel that it is worthwhile work. And you know what, worthwhile work ensures that good agents are engaged and that they want to come in everyday and do their best for their client. If you have agents that want to come to work, they also stay with a call center for a longer period of time. This is also an uncommon trait among call centers, but not the norm with QCS. This allows us to choose core groups of agents that possess the skills needed to be successful on each membership sales or renewal campaign. They have to be friendly and customer service driven and be able to learn about your association and relay information back to the prospect or member. With the baseball association client, we hit it out of the park by renewing memberships at the rate of 7 memberships for every 10 telemarketing hours and 20% conversion. This was at a higher rate than they had achieved internally. It was a home run for their team as we helped them get their renewals while freeing up their team’s time and resources to allocate elsewhere.
A Well Rounded Season
Although we only worked on membership renewal telemarketing for this client, we offer many other services that our association clients can benefit from. We can help your association load the bases by using telemarketing to acquire new members, renew lapsed members, remind members of conferences and educational opportunities as well as sell add ons to your memberships. We are PCI level 1 compliant and some of our teams have the highest level certification, PCI Level 1 Certified Call Center. We also offer local caller ID numbers with your association name to increase answer rates. In addition, our systems enable sending invoices, receipts and informational emails. If you have inbound customer service overflow or need us to offer transferring to your customer service department—we do that too! As you can see we work diligently to make your job easier and offer services to make your memberships rise and renewals easy.
Our team prides itself on doing the absolute best work for your association. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you with your association membership retention via association telemarketing, you can reach us at 1-866-963-2889 or email me at heather.dubas@qualitycontactsolutions.com.
Heather Dubas is a Senior Operations Manager for Quality Contact Solutions. As an Operations Manager, Heather is responsible for managing client programs and ensuring program success. Heather has a B.S. in Business Administration and prior to joining the Quality Contact Solutions team, she spent time working in Account Management at a highly respected call center in the Midwest. Having over 5 years of B2B telemarketing sales experience, Heather is there to assist in achieving your desired results.
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