March 27, 2003
Do Not Call Lists
This Spring, Massachusetts began a statewide "Do Not Call" registration for consumers that wanted telemarketers to stop making unsolicited calls to them at home. We signed up immediately of course (we hardly use our home phone anyhow) and are eagerly waiting the approximate 3 months needed for the list to take full effect.
So far it seems to be working well, it seems that there is only one company calling us right now and if they are still doing so in June, I will report them. The results are very nice.
I was very happy to hear that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is going to roll out a Nationwide Do Not Call List starting over the summer that all U.S. residents will be able to participate in. This too will take about 3 months to take effect from the time you enroll, and will only last for 5 years at a time.
In the meantime to find out if your state participates in a do not call registry already, you can check out the DMA page on this topic.
This brings me to my current thought on this subject. I was considering what call lists such as this would do to the telemarketing industry. While I dislike getting these calls, you have to appreciate a group of business professionals seeing an opportunity and taking full advantage of it. If people weren't buying from telemarketers at a rate which made their investors/shareholders/owners pleased with the quarterly/annual earnings, they would not continue to do so.
That said, what would this national do not call list do to their business? Would it put them right off their mark and cause many of them to close? At this point, the last thing the US needs is more people unemployed, right? Well, what is the biggest problem for telemarketers? I would have to say that it would be the percentage of calls that do not result in a sale. This could also be expressed in the amount of time that they have to spend calling uninterested parties.
By developing a "Do Not Call" list, I actually believe that the FTC is helping these businesses. The individuals that will be adding themselves to these lists will very likely be people who 100% of the time respond with a resounding no (if there is any response at all before the call ends).
Therefore if they made 100 calls previously and only made one sale in that batch, imagine the powerful results that are capable if 50, 75, 90% of your "No thank you" calls are taken out of the mix? They will quickly be able to get right to what they do best, which is sell over the phone to interested parties and hit a larger group of those individuals in a shorter time frame. As long as I am not in the group that is getting the calls, I am all for a business doing well.
Any thoughts?