Guide to cold calling laws in the UK and how to comply.
Telemarketing can prove crucial to your promotional strategy in the B2B space, but there remain pitfalls for which to watch out. Many of these pertain to cold calling; in other words, making unsolicited calls. Calling a business in this manner always poses a degree of risk.
You should be particularly careful that you are not violating any laws which have been implemented to curb cold calls in their form of nuisance calls. What cold calling rules must you heed?
Of course, you know this means law!
These rules fall within the remit of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which is responsible for monitoring and enforcing them. The ICO is a non-departmental public body that upholds two particularly noteworthy pieces of legislation: the Data Protection Act (1998) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.
You could feel daunted by the prospect of having to read through reams of legislative jargon simply to educate yourself on your legal rights relating to cold calling. However, you can relax on this point, as you can follow various simple procedures to help in keeping yourself in compliance.
Many companies have become disgruntled with receiving uninvited sales and promotional calls through their landlines or mobile phones. As a result, these companies have registered the numbers for such with the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS).
UK law requires you to check the list of phone numbers registered with the CTPS before you follow through with a telemarketing campaign. Otherwise, the ICO could fine you as much as £500,000. Over time, more and more UK businesses have become CTPS-registered.
If you task a third-party telemarketing company with making the calls on your own firm's behalf, your company will remain the one liable to pay the fine in the event of a slip-up. Fortunately, as a reliable B2B telemarketing outfit, we will routinely cross-check up-to-date CTPS data against numbers which we were set to dial. This lets us blacklist specific firms and so preserve your position.
Even if you have bought a marketing list of businesses that you can supposedly cold call safely, you could still benefit from obtaining the most recent list of CTPS data.
As a general rule, it would be okay for you to cold call a particular business provided that it is not CTPS-registered. However, if you call this business and it requests to be opted out from future calls, act on this wish by putting the company on your blacklist.
At Prospect Research, we can take over your B2B telemarketing strategy and so help you to benefit from dynamic campaigns that, crucially, won't fall short of UK cold calling law.