Does telemarketing need an address?
Sounds like a daft question doesnt it, after all telemarketing is all about calling a telephone number to speak to a specific person, so what has where the company is located got any thing to do with it ?
Well here are a couple of scenarios where an address is really needed to help with the calling:
- A sales person looks after a specific county and calling needs to focus on just their area
- Similarly a sales person already is going to a specific town and needs some more meetings.
- The client asks for you to focus on a 5 mile radius of a postcode
- You find that a specific area is getting better conversion rates
We are all familiar with how an address looks with the basics for the UK being Line1, Line2, Line3, Town, County, Postcode and Country. The terminology may vary on a country by country basis, but will have the same essential structure.
Doesnt sound like it an issue does it? Well this is where the human brain and computer systems like CRM collide as computer systems need the data in a specific format to support searching for data.
You must have heard of the old saying "garbage in, garbage out", well a lot of the problems in supporting address searches start at the data import point.
In an ideal world any address data you get would be nicely formatted into line 1, line 2, line 3, town, county, postcode and country.
Unfortunately you are more likely to get some thing like this
If we just import the data shown in the second image, most computer systems would just put the whole address into Line1 and so not be able to support any of the searches.
So what can we do? Well this is where Excel comes to the rescue!
Excel allows you to "split" the data by looking for a "delimiter" or in other words a marker where one bit of information ends and then a new one starts.
So once you open up your Excel and find the column with the "bad" address data, make sure you have some empty columns next to it and follow the following steps:
- Select the column containing your addresses.
- Go to the "Data" tab and click on "Text to Columns."
- Choose "Delimited" as the option and click "Next."
- Select the delimiter that separates your address components, comma in the example shown
- Preview the results and, if everything looks good, click "Finish."
As if by a miracle, your bad data will be transformed into well structured "good" data!
One special case you might come up against is when your data looks like this when you click into an address cell
There are no commas or similar, but you will notice that each address component is on a separate line.
This has what are called "line breaks" in it.
To separate this data into its components, you need to use "Ctl+J" as shown below
This trick can also be used to split names into its components.
As a key take away from this article you should always review you data and correct before entry into any system.
At the outset this may take more time, but doing this will give you more flexibility on how you manage your operations.