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Telemarketing call center: A new marketing paradigm

Telemarketing is a new marketing strategy which has evolved in the past few decades. It uses the sophisticated telephone technology in a dedicated environment to help companies keep in close contact with present and potential customers, increase sales, and enhance business productivity. This type of marketing is carried out in a telemarketing call center in a well-planned and organized fashion. The rapid development of telephony technology is one of the prime reasons to give impetus to growth of telemarketing call center services. In 1996 sales worth 63.1 billions US dollars were made through telemarketing. This figure rose astoundingly to 1.1 trillion US dollars in 2002!

There are several advantages of doing marketing through a telemarketing call center. It saves a lot of time for the sales representatives and increases their actual field selling time. A phone call takes much less of the customer's time than face-to-face sales. Secondly, phone calls can be more regular and frequent than face-to-face sales. A telemarketing staff costs much less to a company to maintain than high-priced field sales personnel. All the marketing is done sitting in an office using a telephone. Thus the number of sales representatives required is very less as compared to traditional methods of marketing where large geographical distances have to be traversed to do sales. A telemarketing call center is easy to set up and once functioning can easily adapt to a wide variety of operation such as to sell, to do surveys, to announce changes or special offers, to make appointments, to qualify leads, to cross-sell, and to check credit.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) issued the amended Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) on January 29, 2003. One significant amendment to the TSR prohibits calling consumers who have put their phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. The commission maintains a National Do Not Call Registry, a list of phone numbers from consumers who want to limit the calls from a telemarketing call center. According to the new regulations ,a company with which a consumer has an established business relationship may call for up to 18 months after the consumer’s last purchase or last delivery, or last payment, unless the consumer asks the company not to call again. In that case, the company must honor the request of not to call. If the company calls again, it may be subject to a fine of up to $11,000. A consumer whose number is not on the national registry can still prohibit individual telemarketers from calling by asking to be put on the company’s own do not call list.