Teletext Holidays was a legacy brand with 60% brand recognition but only a 2% consideration. The common perception was that the brand vanished after discontinuing the Teletext “Data service” on TV.
Discover how Non-Exec Chairman Steve Endacott orchestrated the brand’s revival.
How Teletext Holidays rose again.
In December 2011, Kumar Edra, an Indian-based call centre magnate, acquired the Teletext brand from the Daily Mail group. He swiftly transitioned its revenue model from selling calls to third parties to an exclusive booking arrangement with his India-based call centre, leading to an overnight profit surge of 80%.
The appointment of Steve Endacott as Non-Exec Director Chairman proved pivotal. Leveraging his comprehensive UK network, Steve recruited a new management team led by Wayne Perks, the former Commercial Director of Virgin Holidays.
This management team, guided by Steve, boosted volumes and profits further by implanting many further improvements, three examples of which are listed below.
Resisting the temptation to offer online booking.
- Brand research for Teletext revealed that customers preferred calling for the best last-minute 7-night beach holiday deals.
- Competing websites require customers to specify destinations before displaying prices.
- Teletext had the unique ability to offer economical deals anywhere through a simple call, linking customers with experts privy to late availability.
- A cost-efficient call centre infrastructure made this service feasible.
- Designated numbers per offer facilitated the implementation of destination-specialist ‘hunt groups’, connecting customers with the most suitable agents.
- Screen popping ensured that the agent knew what the customer was enquiring about.
Learning. Not following your competitors in moving fully online left a health market segment to chase with little competition.
Big Data analysis of the Call centre performance.
• Every inbound and outbound call was documented—recorded and automatically transcribed—to verify compliance with a pre-established set of ‘Golden Rules’.
• Interestingly, Teletext’s best sellers often prompted the highest number of complaints and brand damage due to their overly assertive sales techniques. This issue was identified through the above process, enabling the maintenance of sales volumes while significantly improving quality scores.
Learning. Quality of service provides the only long-term assurance of profitability, as repeat booking is essential in a world of ever-escalating Google advertising costs.
Using long-tail TV advertising as a direct response mechanism to replace Google PPC.
- Television advertisements can now be produced with as minimal a budget as £10,000.
- The ideal ratio between the cost of TV advertisement creation and expenditure should be 10% to 90%.
- Many UK satellite TV channels, due to insufficient viewership during certain timeslots, are compelled to offer free advertisements, enabling the creation of 42% free adverts.
- Target demographics include mothers at home. Channels airing children’s cartoons or classic films often yield the most effective responses as the advertisements can sometimes be more appealing to the mothers than the programmes themselves.
- The costlier the TV slot, the higher the cost per call generated; thus, peak evening slots should be avoided unless the primary objective is to increase brand awareness through large-scale, repeated TV advertising.
Learning. Above-the-line advertising can also be used for a direct response if you have a strong legacy brand to create direct response calls as well as general brand building.