Call Center to open international offices
In 1997, Call Center Poland was the first direct-marketing company in the country to set up its own direct-marketing telephone call center.
Today, in a competitive market, Call Center Poland has been successful enough to consider traversing Poland's southern and eastern borders to set up call centers in two neighboring countries. In the coming years, further call centers are planned outside the country.
"This year we're expanding to the first foreign markets," said Kinga Nowakowska, the managing director of Call Center Poland. While details of the expansion have not yet been announced, Nowakowska said the decision is based on Call Center Poland's sound financial results and strong development in 2000.
When it first started, Call Center Poland, part of the Galicja Group, focused on providing promotional infolines phone numbers that provided simple information about events or products. Next came consumer infolines, where people were employed to answer questions and solve the problems of their clients' customers. And finally Call Center Poland developed consumer-contact centers, which used communication channels such as telephone, fax, WAP, and SMS messages to contact clients' customers. Today, Call Center Poland has about 60 clients including Canal+, Phillip Morris, Fiat, Bank Przemyslowo-Handlowy (BPH) and Bank Gospodarki Zywnosciowej (BGZ).
Dozens of companies in Poland claim to do direct marketing, or at least to have direct marketing among their services. And as the market has grown, so too has the variety of direct marketing tools they use.
"First it was direct mail," said Janusz Jezierski, the president of ABC Direct Contact. "Then two years ago telemarketing became very popular. Then loyalty programs appeared and today it's customer relationship management."
ABC Direct Contact specializes in mass distribution of direct marketing material. The company also does sales promotions, collates database information and performs market surveys for supermarkets.
"It appears that three quarters of people take (direct mail) positively," Jezierski said.
It wasn't always so readily accepted, said Tomasz Kostyra, president of the Direct Marketing Association (SMB), which lists 80 companies as members. In the early 1990s, he says Poland's direct marketing operators usually delivered poor service at a high price.
By the mid-1990s, German firm Bertelsmann and U.S. publishing company Reader's Digest had entered the market and were establishing solid direct-marketing standards. And today, Kostyra said, those standards are even better. "Direct marketing is becoming more trendy," Jezierski said. "Smart people realize that direct marketing is as efficient as above-the-line advertising."
According to Krzysztof Stremler, deputy sales director of BusinessPoint,, IT technologies are also bringing more sophistication to the way direct-marketing companies operate. "(BusinessPoint's) call center proves that, because it's being integrated with such direct-marketing tools as the Internet, e-mail, fax," Stremler said.
Stremler added that today's clients are also becoming more sophisticated, demanding more from marketing campaigns. In some cases, new modes of communication such as e-mail or SMS messages are being utilized to constantly keep in touch with customers.
"It's due to the client's education that they want all these activities to be combined to get better results," Stremler said.
Loyalty programs are another sign of growing sophistication. These programs guarantee customers a reward for staying with their companies. Customers are given points and prizes for using services or buying products. Good examples of companies that implemented loyalty programs are Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (Era) and a large number of gas station operators such as Polski Koncern Naftowy Orlen (PKN Orlen), Shell, BP and Statoil.
Some companies have taken direct marketing into their own hands and established their own call centers. One such company is Wizja TV, a digital TV platform owned by United Pan-European Communications (UPC). "Direct marketing is a great way to provide more advanced information on a product, in comparison to the advertising campaign in the media for instance," said Dorota Zawadzka, the PR director of UPC's Polish operations. Wizja TV recently used direct marketing tools including direct mailing to launch chello, UPC's subsidiary that provides access to the Internet via cable TV and satellite.
As for the future of direct marketing in Poland, SMB's Kostyra said there is still plenty of room for new players. On March 11, he attended an American Association of Direct Marketing meeting in Hamburg, where many companies expressed interest in the Polish market.
"There is a chance that new companies will appear on the market in the near future," Kostyra said.
