The launch of BT’s call blocking service will harm legitimate telemarketers and trigger even more nuisance calls, according to one leading telemarketing expert.
Dene Walsh, operations and compliance director at Verso Group, predicts that the BT scheme – hailed by both Ofcom and Which? – will have the opposite effect of what it claims.
He said: “Calls from companies that abide by regulation will be the ones that do not get through. The rogues will simply keep switching Calling Line Identity (CLI). What BT will do is send misuse of CLI into overdrive as those that ignore regulations pick up work from those that behave ethically.
“Rogue companies will have no problem churning through CLIs, while those that stick to the rules get punished. The result will be BT customers receiving an increasingly large number of calls from the worst offenders who will grow in number.”
Walsh, who sits on the DMA Contact Centre & Telemarketing Council, also questions BT’s motives in launching the service, suggesting that the company could even be trying to stifle competition from rival firms.
He added: “After all, [BT is] the company that registered customers on the TPS without them knowing in order to prevent rivals with better deals calling its customers.
“For all the hot air claims around ending calls from rogue companies BT’s initiative will simply make them bigger, richer and more powerful.
“Whether BT genuinely considered its new service a good way of heading off nuisance calls, or heading off rivals that have better tariff offers we are unlikely to ever know. But if it is the former the company is not alone in touting badly thought through ideas.”
He concluded: “If you want to know how to stop rogues callers ask those of us that have to try and compete against them what the most effective policies would be. We have an acute understanding of how to defeat them, but strangely nobody ever asks us.”
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