Research on Factors Affecting Performance Indicators of Telemarketers Based on Talk Time in the Life Insurance Market: The Case of Korea

摘要

The telemarketing industry is gradually expanding its area as the telecommunication industry has rapidly developed. Especially the telemarketing sector of the insurance companies has been showing the most outstanding growth. They not only increase investment to achieve good telemarketing performance, but also benchmark practice of other competitors and aim for further improvement via their own knowhow. According to the survey by American Report, expenses related to the telemarketers comprise 62% of the telemarketing cost. This indicates that effective management of telemarketers is more important than deployment of system equipment and various solutions. There are correlations between the effective management of telemarketers and the amount of their average income generated as well as their turnover due to resignation and/or moving to another company. Savings in payment to telemarketers in advance may be interpreted also as a performance indicator for insurance companies. Then, the performance indicators of insurance companies can be expressed in detail into commissions of telemarketers, cases of new sales, and amount of first premiums. In this study, we analyzed actual data related to telemarketing performance indicators to assess such performance indicators. Multiple regression analysis was applied, based on one year records, after confirming correlations among talk time, experiences, contact time, sex, age, and education all of which are telemarketing performance indicators. It is shown that there is a meaningful correlation between commissions, first premiums and new sales cases which are the business achievement of telemarketers, and total talk time and work experiences which are determinants of performance. Talk time, experiences, contact were turned out to be significant, while personal characteristics were not. In order to improve the total talk time based on this analysis, we propose to manage performance indicators by working month and training, and to introduce improved so called "Self-Call Check" through standardizing sales script of telemarketers. We also present how to improve the performance of life insurance telemarketers by extending their talk time.