Calling Door-To-Door Dakotah Direct Telemarketers Take Up The Challenge Of Often Hostile Sales Targets

Tony Omer thinks of himself as a singer.

After 18 months of making thousands of telemarketing calls at Dakotah Direct Inc., he said, the scripts he reads to customers are like lyrics.

And his skills in projecting the words over a telephone headset are as important as the insurance products he sells.

Omer and other Dakotah Direct employees say they consider as a challenge the frequently hostile receptions they get from the hundreds of people they contact each day.

“Maybe they just haven’t been treated nice,” said Barbara Pulliam, who has worked for another telemarketer in the past.

“If they’re having a bad day you can make it a good day,” she said.

Omer, Pulliam and millions like them are the door-to-door salespeople of the Nineties. If often reviled, they also sold goods and services to 81 million Americans in 1995, according to the American Telemarketing Association.

Sales in 1996 were worth almost $170 billion - and those are just outbound calls.

Dakotah has taken its share, growing from a start-up business with just $300,000 in revenues in 1992 to $45 million this year, said President Mike Kuhn.

That’s probably good enough to put the company among the 25 largest telemarketers in the country, he said.

In the year 2000, Kuhn said, company officials expect annual revenues to reach $150 million.

Telemarketing Association President Mary Weyand said telephone sales have overtaken mail as the biggest generator of direct sales to consumers.

New technology, she said, allows companies to establish telephone relationships nearly as good as those made face-to-face without the expense of putting a sales force on the street.

Although most direct marketing is handled in-house, Weyand said more businesses are turning to independent providers like Dakotah.

Kuhn agreed. “We’ll be announcing some interesting clients this summer,” he said.

Kuhn is one of four executives who founded the company by purchasing the equipment of defunct Voicelink Data Services Inc.

Dakotah has since become the operating unit of Genesis Teleserv Corp. Kuhn said that merger, announced last summer, has provided the capital to upgrade Dakotah’s software, hardware and facilities.

Investment in 1998 will hit $7 million, he said.

The original call center on the Sixth Floor of The Bon Building has become just one of a network of 13 centers located from Spokane and the Tri-Cities eastward into North Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois. More, including one in Coeur d’Alene, are planned, and a new headquarters is under construction in the Spokane Valley.

Some are shared with a subsidiary, Dakotah Reservations Services Inc., which serves the hospitality and travel industry.

Employment has rocketed to 2,300 - 1,200 in Spokane - pushing officials on a never-ending quest for new blood.

Vice President Carole Mohr said turnover averages 200 percent per year. Though that rate of turnover is startling, she said the figure is less than half the average for the industry, where the revolving door sometimes spins at the rate of 1000 percent per year.

She said Dakotah slows attrition by stressing full-time positions and providing a substantial benefit package.

“We continually have to be creative,” she said, adding that the key is making employees feel valuable.

The Dakotah workforce is almost 80 percent full time, an unusually high share for the industry, Mohr said.

Mohr said retaining workers costs far less than recruiting and training new ones.

Kuhn said the competition for representatives will get tougher as Coldwater Creek and The Travelers demand more workers with those skills.

“I’m sure all of us will be training people for each other,” he said, pointing to Omaha, Neb. - home to 35 call centers - as a worst case.

Kuhn said Dakotah may build its own training center to help meet its manpower needs. The company’s average wage is slightly more than $12 an hour with incentives and bonuses included, he noted.

Dakotah also is trying to hire people from the hospitality, insurance and utility industries who already have the product knowledge clients are seeking.

There’s plenty of variety.

Surveying a whiteboard in The Bon center, he said employees were working off six different scripts. Some could be selling insurance, others credit cards, while still others take market surveys.

New technology keeps representatives on the line for as many as 50 minutes out of an hour, up from 43 minutes a few years ago.

Although the bulk of the calls are outbound, Kuhn said the percent should drop to 60 percent next year as Dakotah expands its customerservice capabilities.

The company’s new center in the Airport Business Park will handle inbound calls almost exclusively, he said. The center will be open 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

“We’re tracking a whole different customer,” Kuhn said.

For example, he said, representatives may field calls from customers of Ameritech, which provides phone service in the Midwest. Those customers may not know how to connect a caller-ID device.

As employees on the service desk become more adept at solving such problems, Kuhn said, they will be able to sell improved services or other products that fit those consumers.

“People get much better at what they’re doing,” he said.

Kuhn said the company will enjoy greater profits on such calls, and more opportunities to build customer relationships.

Expanding the services provided to long-standing customers has fueled much of Dakotah’s growth, he said.

The mainstays have been telecommunications companies, major banks and, more recently, insurance companies like those Omer represents on the phone.

Occasionally, employees get to meet officials from the companies they represent in their calls.

Pulliam said Ameritech asked workers how the company might improve its sales programs. Officials got the feedback they were looking for, she said, and Dakotah’s employees came away with a greater understanding of Ameritech’s needs.

“It gave me a better outlook,” Pulliam said.

Weyand blamed widespread consumer irritation with untimely calls on companies that do not take time to carefully match customer lists to the products or services they are trying to sell.

Errant calls waste the time of telemarketers and residents alike, she said. “We do not want to be on the phone with someone who does not want to be on the phone with us.”

Weyand said the industry tries to minimize customer annoyance by asking them a few qualifying questions up front.

Jim Auer, who leads one of the 23-person teams clustered in The Bon center, said Dakotah protects clients from complaints about unauthorized sales by verifying each one on tape.

Kuhn said consumer fears that personal information will be compromised over the phone are overblown. Scrambling prevents abuses, he said.

“We’ve never had a claim, and we’ve made millions of phone calls,” he said.

Kuhn said the industry’s next frontier is integration with the Internet. Sales through Web sites require “fulfillment” that will be handled through call centers, he said.

Weyand said technology allows representatives and customers to look at the same Web information when they are on the phone together.

And working with a person reassures Web shoppers, she said.

Dakotah workers said projecting personality is the key to their job.

“I just love getting on the phone,” said Omer. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TELEMARKETING FACTS The industry employs more than 4.5 million worldwide, with60,000 call centers in the U.S. alone. Telemarketing represents 40 percent of direct marketing spending, compared with 27 percent for direct mail. In 1996, business-to-business sales reached $244 billion, and consumer sales $169 billion. The American Telemarketing Association has 1,800 individual members representing 900 companies.