A U.K. provider of products to the telemarketing industry recently sent us an email newsletter that touches on some of the regulatory issues concerning do not call lists, silent calls, etc. I thought I would share two portions of it:

[I]f in any country you measure silent calls by the admirable code of practice established by the Direct Marketing Association in the UK, it’s not difficult to see how easily a silent call rate of at least 50% can and does happen in practice; for example both as a result of silent calls being measured in the wrong way and also of consumers being put on hold, in the absence of any agent being available to talk to them. Some responsible marketeers, and there are plenty of them, find it hard to accept that call centres run their operations at such high levels of silent calls.

Regulators have been slow to act in both the US and the UK, for different reasons. In the US the right to call and abuse consumers with telephone calls, any which way, seemed almost to be embodied in the constitution in the 1990’s. By the time the regulators were asked to act the damage was done, and consumers in the US swamped the DNC list there. In the UK, consumers have been much less accepting of outbound calls than in the US. Unfortunately, the UK regulator, Ofcom, has been very slow to understand the workings of the dialer marketplace, and its gentlemanly calls for restraint rather than a firm set of rules and penalties have gone unheeded in many quarters until now. Your writer sat at a recent conference and watched the senior Ofcom representative present clap heartily when one speaker called for the UK outbound market to self-regulate! The English senses of fair play and personal responsibility appear to die hard within Ofcom. Let’s just hope that this tradition of expecting chaps to do the ‘right thing’ in outbound markets doesn’t persist until everyone in the UK has joined the UK national DNC list!

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