Thursday, September 15, 2011

Telemarketing in the UK

By Chris Harding


Lately, telemarketing has suffered a bad rap. Whereas once upon a time it was an efficient way for UK companies to build their business profiles and win clients, nowadays different processes apply and firms need to be shrewder than ever before.

The problem is that in the UK in the 90s, many telemarketing firms got carried away with themselves and bombarded the nation's phone lines with sales calls selling everything from contract cleaning to ladies undies. With everyone's phone number available in the phone book, the phone was viewed as the quickest way to reach the greatest number of folks.

Lots of the issues came from the undeniable fact that many telemarketing UK firms were using untrained folk to make mountains of calls. This meant that the folk making the calls had little appreciation of what they were doing or the benefits of the products that they were selling. Plenty of these calls were simply time wasting for both the caller and the callee.

By 2000, the telemarketing UK industry was under fire and quite soon, forced to change it tactics. These days, strict regulations are established. To prevent unwished-for calls, a phone user simply has to register their number with the Direct Promoting Association (DMA). Should a phone user receive any calls from a company after registering with the DMA, that telemarketing UK Company can be fined.

It all changed in 2003 when the govt. passed the Government's Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. This law made it illegal for telemarketing UK corporations to make unsought direct selling calls or even send faxes to such corporations who said that they do not want to get such calls.

This law has forced telemarketing UK firms to be much more pro in their approach. As it is no longer legal to blank call hundreds of phone numbers out of the yellow pages, research has become much more skilled as has coaching.

These days, only firms that know precisely what they are doing get involved in telemarketing, which has seen the standards of this industry rise significantly.






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