"Silent" Calls Under New Legal Rulings |
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Due to the high percentage of people quizzed by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) complaining that silent calls were really cheesing them off, the DMA has introduced new rules for companies wishing to call up phone customers.
The new rules, in a nutshell, mean that telemarketers must now leave a number when the call is made, so that the recipient can dial 1471 and trace who it is who is calling them. DMA members and trade associations have three months to comply.
But with 22 per cent of people - mostly the elderly, who receive on average 7.6 silent calls a month, because they are at home all day, saying that silent calls left them anxious, the move is seen as too little too late: and anyway, the 1471 number is often useless as it goes to a dead terminal that no one answers.
Silent calls are generated by automated dialers cold calling people. When connected they should route the call to an agent. If there is no agent present the call is silent.
One way around it is to use recorded messages to connect the caller if no agent is free, but the DMA's study reveals that this is actually considered even more annoying than silent calls -35 per cent registering this as most annoying, compared with 25 per cent for silent calls.
The study finds that, on average, your typical phone owner will receive 5.7 silent calls a month. The over 65's get 7.3. Some 36 per cent of the population are lucky enough to receive no silent calls.
The growth in this form of contact is demonstrated by the fact that agent positions in outbound call centres in the UK have grown by 50 per cent in the past six years, says the DMA.
Many phone owners who are annoyed by silent calls are opting to put their names on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which in theory should prevent them receiving any unsolicited calls from anyone.
Currently 7.4million people in the UK have registered with the TPS. Once mobile phones have been excluded this represents around 32 per cent of UK households that have a phone. In the past 12 months weekly registrations with the TPS have risen from 35,000 to 73,000.
This shows how fed up the bulk of the population is becoming with cold calls. The UK's communications regulator Ofcom does take action against companies that persistently misuse cold calling, but this is largely viewed as a drop in the ocean.
Cold outbound calling sits in a grey area legally. The EU's electronic communicatons directive basically bars anyone from electronically contacting someone that they don't have an existing relationship with. But much of this is written in terms of email and SMS spam messages. Cold calling from lists that people appear on because they haven't ticked the box saying that their details can't be used or passed on doesn't contravene this law.
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