With its market being gradually eroded by upstart telecom rivals, BT has lost the habit of scoring marketing successes. So the jubilation that has greeted the signing of 1m consumers to its BT Privacy service, giving free Caller Display and registration with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), is understandable.
'The interest has been phenomenal and the huge numbers have taken us by surprise,' says BT Retail chief operating officer John Petter. 'To have a customer sign up every three seconds is remarkable and shows what an irritant many of these (unsolicited marketing) calls are.'
Unfortunately, the vast number of people wanting to sign up for TPS also took service administrator the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) by surprise, meaning it had no time to gear up properly to deal with the response.
BT has always passed on to the DMA the details of customers bothered by unsolicited marketing calls and 'silent' calls, caused when call centres' automatic diallers put a call through but no telemarketer is available to pick it up.
With complaints to BT's Nuisance Calls Bureau at an all-time high of 130,000 a month, the company told the DMA it was planning to streamline the way it dealt with the problem, according to Tessa Kelly, DMA director of compliance operations.
But Kelly, who runs the preference services, had no idea BT was planning to make a major campaign out of the issue. Within days of the company's 拢3m TV, press and poster campaign beginning on 12 July, her team was deluged with contact details from BT.
Already registered
The DMA swiftly discovered that about half of the numbers sent in were already registered with TPS. 'We suspect many people think this is some form of new service BT is offering,' says Kelly.
An extra 500,000 telephone numbers represents a huge, sudden increase on the TPS' previous total of 8.65m and suggests BT is cashing in on a service already available to the public. Other than leaving it in a prime position in the race for telecom share, what effect will this have on a telemarketing industry already struggling with a bad reputation?
Mike Havard, managing director of CRM and call centre consultancy CM Insight, says that rogue telemarketing is becoming the single biggest populist issue in the UK, meaning that BT is onto a winner. 'As in the US, the unpopularity of cold-calling in the UK is accelerating.'
BT is not the first to respond to the problem. Havard has long advised clients to seek alternative methods of attracting new customers. He also predicts that companies will start paying more attention to improving services to current customers so that cross-selling opportunities can be maximised.
The telemarketing industry is attempting to clean up its act, looking at adding an automated message to silent calls and ensuring the source of all calls can be identified on Caller Display.
If call centres do improve in this way, is there any need for BT to get involved? The problem for those telemarketing companies acting in the right way are those rogue operators that ignore DMA guidelines, which are giving the entire industry a bad name.
CM Insight research, conducted a year ago, found that 40% of telemarketers reported that response rates had already dropped, and the same proportion expected them to fall further. The picture is likely to become even bleaker, as calls from US companies, which the UK authorities are powerless to stop, have vastly increased.
Jeff Smith, chairman of call centre operator MM Teleperformance, agrees that it has become much harder to conduct outbound telemarketing for clients, but he feels that those 'lost' to TPS would have been the type of people less likely to respond anyway.
Smith has mixed feelings about the BT Privacy campaign. While he thinks that encouraging greater take-up of Caller Display is a good way of helping consumers avoid foreign or silent calls, he is frustrated that bad practice in the industry is forcing consumers to take the 'blanket' solution of signing up to avoid all unsolicited calls. 'The biggest threat is that consumers get so cheesed off with outbound calling that they all end up on TPS,' he says.
Consumer demand
It is in its fight against the rogue call centres avoiding DMA guidelines that BT's Privacy service will find much support among consumers.
A BT spokesman says the company's motivation in mounting this campaign was simply a response to customer demand for something to counter unwanted marketing calls.
But the Privacy push brings another potential advantage for BT. Ofcom recently unveiled proposals that would make it more economically feasible for other telecom companies to offer fixed lines - currently the last part of the telecom market still dominated by BT.
If these proposals become law, consumers would no longer need to have any dealings with BT. Services such as Privacy, and this autumn's major brand ad campaign, will maintain BT's link with consumers, helping the firm to strengthen its reputation for acting in their interest and beat off the start-ups hitting its market share.
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