Telemarketing in the UK
In recent times, telemarketing has suffered a bad rap. While at one time it was an effective way for UK firms to build their business profiles and win customers, these days different processes apply and corporations have to be shrewder than ever.
The issue is that in the United Kingdom in the 90s, many telemarketing corporations got carried away with themselves and battered the country’s telephone lines with sales calls selling everything from contract cleaning to womens lingerie. With everybody’s telephone number available in the telephone book, the telephone was thought of as the swiftest way to get to the best number of people.
A lot of the issues came from the undeniable fact that many telemarketing UK companies were using untrained people to make mountains of calls. This meant that the folks making the calls had small experience of what they were doing or the benefits of the products that they were selling. A large amount 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 shortly, made to change it strategies. Nowadays, tough laws are in place. To stop unwelcome calls, a telephone user simply has to register their number with the Direct Marketing Organisation (DMA). Should a telephone 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) Laws 2003. This law made it illegal for telemarketing UK firms to make unsolicited direct promoting calls or even send faxes to such companies who said that they do not want to get such calls.
This law has forced telemarketing UK corporations to be much more professional in their approach. As it is no longer legal to ignore call loads of telephone numbers out of the phone book, research has become much more proficient as has training.
Nowadays, only companies that know exactly what they are doing become involved in telemarketing, that has seen the standards of this industry rise noticeably.
Chris Harding runs ‘I Am Telemarketing ‘ in the UK and has over 25 years of telemarketing experience.