While inbound call center services attend to the enquiries of company customers, outbound call center services are aimed at enlisting customers to purchase the services or products of the company. In these services, the representatives of the company initiate the calls to the customers to sell the companys product or services. This type of service may be called telemarketing.

The call center representatives use telephones to call prospective customers. Alternatively, representatives can also send emails. An outbound call center compiles and maintains a large database of personal information about the potential customers. These databases are obtained on shared effort bases, or just purchased. Unfortunately, these addresses and telephones numbers are sometimes obtained sometimes by dubious methods. This is done by poaching the data from the customer databases of other companies through their employees. Customers telephone numbers are also obtained from telephone directories.

Care is taken to contact only those customers whose requirements are expected to match the products of the company for which they are working. For example if you are selling veterinary products, you would collect the data of those customers who maintain pets and other animals, farmers, dog and horse owners etc. Once a customer shows an interest in your product, a sales executive is sometimes sent to meet the customer at his office or residence to personally answer his queries and canvass for the sale of the product and receive the orders.

While marinating a network of sales representatives implies a lot of burden upon the management, using another agency or outbound call center to sell your products is not always seen as a profitable proposition. An important principle of sales promotion implies building up an intimate and enduring relationship with the customers so that they come again and again to purchase your product.

Using an outsourced outbound call center invites an indirect, impersonal relationship with customers. It also means less control over sales representatives. This appears to be a great drawback in hiring outbound call center services, howsoever hardworking and honest they may be.