Lead Generation for Business Link - Market Research Case Study

Longstanding relationship provides a wide range of services, including database profiling, lead generation and email registrations

Business Link in London was a publicly funded body, providing a free service for small or medium sized business. The service, delivered by Serco, offered high quality information and practical advice to help business people tackle their challenges directly or with further expert assistance. The online portal was replaced along with Directgov by the new GOV.UK website in Oct 2012.

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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 provided a wide range of services to address these needs. The calling projects 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 were all 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 on-going 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 were agreed as required, where Business Link personnel 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.