New cold-calling law for business

It will soon be an offence punishable by up to a £5,000 fine to make an unsolicited call to any business that has placed its telephone numbers on the Telephone Preference Service opt-out list. However a survey run by MarketingFile.com, the telemarketing data website, of over 900 predominantly smaller businesses identifies that 70 per cent are completely unaware of this new law.

The existing Telephone Preference Service (TPS) legislation that enables individuals to opt out their telephone number from unsolicited calls is to be extended to cover business telephone numbers from Friday 25th June 2004.

MarketingFile is providing a free service that lets you check whether a number can be called or not.

A big problem for small businesses

The new legislation poses a serious problem for all businesses that sell to other businesses as they will have to check every number they want to call against the TPS opt-out list before they call it.

The MarketingFile.com survey shows that:

• 83 per cent of businesses make unsolicited calls to numbers held on their databases of customers or enquirers and 58 per cent call numbers on cold prospect lists that have been bought-in. These will need to be ‘cleaned’ against TPS before sales calls are made.
  
• More than 50 per cent make ad-hoc unsolicited calls to numbers that they come across during the day - for example on websites, on letterheads, business cards and signs and in directories and magazines. These numbers will also need to be checked individually before each call and this is probably the area where most businesses will fall foul of the law.

The MarketingFile.com survey indicates that only six per cent intend to license a copy of the TPS file which costs £7,500 per annum for the full list of consumers and a further £3,750 for the list of businesses. Up to a third will use a data bureau service to clean their files and databases and nearly one in four businesses say they simply will not bother to comply.

New law ‘will adversely affect business’

The majority of businesses surveyed are deeply unhappy with the new law. Just 27 per cent thought the new rules were ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ a good idea, whereas 69 per cent thought Corporate TPS either a ‘bad idea’ or a ‘terrible idea that will adversely affect my business’. This hostility to the new law is unsurprising since 78 per cent said the unsolicited calls they make are either ‘essential’ or ‘useful’ for finding and retaining customers.

Although cold calling is becoming increasingly unpopular amongst consumers with some 4m numbers already registered on the TPS, the MarketingFile.com survey found that two-thirds of businesses do not mind receiving unsolicited calls and three per cent actually like them.

Although a quarter of businesses dislike receiving unsolicited calls and four per cent are ‘absolutely incensed by them’ only 16 per cent plan to register their own business telephone numbers with TPS to stop them. However this relatively low figure still suggests that as many as 224,000 of the approximately 1.4m plcs and limited companies in the UK might opt-out. This means that unless telephone numbers are checked against TPS before calling, then nearly 1 in every 6 sales calls to businesses will be to a number that is opted out.