Classifying customers on the basis of their attitudes towards telemarketing

Abstract

Telemarketing belongs to a new breed of potent technology-driven business tools that have evolved in direct response to the changes in today's business environment. Being rooted in a technological foundation, telemarketing offers flexibility, and simultaneously lowers the costs of reaching customers and meeting their needs. Compared to traditional marketing approaches, the telemarketing approach has been designed and developed for the contemporary business environment. Despite its advantages, focussing too much on this technology-driven approach without understanding customers attitudes and preferences for such an approach can lead to disastrous results for an organization. The article argues that telemarketing practices ought to be managed in accordance with customers attitudes towards such practices. The objective of the article is to use intelligent techniques such as Feature Selection and Classification and Regression Techniques (CRT) to classify customers according to their positive or negative attitudes towards telemarketing. The model thus arrived at may be used to better understand customer attitudes and accordingly target telemarketing efforts more successfully. Significant determining variables that can help capture acceptance or non-acceptance of telemarketing channels by customers were identified from the literature and focused group discussion. Likert scale responses were collected from a sample of 400 respondents using a structured questionnaire. The application of Feature Selection and CRT resulted in the identification of two segments of customers: Acceptors and Rejecters. The findings also show that customers view telemarketing as an approach used by companies to sell their products any which way, with lack of concern for customers choices and comfort. This study, by building a model to classify customers according to their positive or negative attitudes towards telemarketing, helps in reducing this disconnect between customers and the telemarketing approach being adopted by organizations. © 2009 Palgrave Macmillan.