The Implemented Laws for Telemarketing Call Centers

Telemarketing is the most popular and cost-effective marketing and communication technique available. It helps your business conserve more time, money, and workforce. It is a method of direct marketing in which an agent proposes to the prospective customer to buy products or services over the phone. It is a great way to promote your products or services, that is why outbound call centers emerged and are widely used by businesses.

Outbound telemarketing is a huge business but it can be annoying to those who receive these calls multiple times a day. It has been reported that households particularly in western countries received billions of calls in a year from faceless telemarketers. They sometimes call your household at the most inopportune time, either early in the morning when you are still fast asleep, at dinner time when everybody is set at the table, or before bedtime when a mother is reading a story to her child. Is it not annoying when you rush out from the bathroom halfway done taking a bath, or get out from under the car covered with grease, just to pick up the phone and only to find out an unknown caller is trying to sell you something you do not need?

Because of the rapid growth of telemarketing call centers, several laws were passed and amended. However, these laws differ from state to state and from country to country. In the face of all the difference, each telemarketing companies have the sole responsibility to become familiar with the laws governing the industry in a specific locale. They are obliged to adhere with all the relevant laws imposed on their industry.

According to the Official Business Link to the U.S. Government, telemarketing is regulated at the federal level by two statutes: The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) and the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) derives its regulatory authority from TCPA, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is responsible for enforcing TSR. The FTC implemented the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act of 1994, a federal legislation in the United States, to combat telephone fraud. It helps consumers how to differentiate between fraudulent and legitimate telemarketing.

The law established the FTC's National Do-Not-Call Registry in 2003 in order to facilitate compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA). A Do-Not-Call (DNC) Registry is managed by the FTC to make it easier and more efficient to prevent telemarketing calls that you do not want. It is a list of phone numbers from consumers who do not wish to be called by telemarketers, otherwise, consumers can file a complaint against the company. The telemarketing laws of the FCC also require that calls made by predictive dialers to wireless telephone numbers be prohibited. It also prohibits sending any unsolicited fax advertisements, the use of automatic dialers, or sending recorded messages.

On the other hand, telemarketing companies are also required to maintain their own internal Do-Not-Call list. If you are contacted by a company that is exempted from the national DNC registry, such as banks, federal credit unions and loans, or telephone and airline companies, you can ask them to put your number in their internal DNC list, otherwise, you can file a complaint against the company as well. You can also take advantage of this strategy even if you do not subscribe to the national DNC registry.

Conducting a Quality Market Research Survey

A survey is a systematic method of collecting data from a population of interest. The purpose of a survey is to collect quantitative information, usually through the use of a structured and standardized questionnaire. A good-structured questionnaire is the foundation of a quality market research survey. It is the basic tool to gather data that are specific and crucial to the success of your business. A carefully designed questionnaire can generate vast amount of revenue or it can dramatically change strategies.

Through market research survey, you can determine the likely performance of a product or service, the buying behavior of consumers, consumers' awareness of a product or service, and the consumers' attitude toward existing or proposed products and services. The effectiveness of the questions would depend on the way they are structured such that your results will be relevant, accurate, and even conclusive.

There are different methods of market research surveys and they are categorized depending upon your target market or population of interest. There are so many factors to be considered as well in conducting a quality research surveys, but the most important thing is how to construct a survey questionnaire that would help you convince your respondents to answer it accurately.


Composing your Survey Questionnaire

In order to have a quality survey, try to make your questionnaire as short as possible. Use only those questions that will provide the information you need. Do not make it too broad and you will need to ask too many questions, or do not make it too narrow and you will not be able to research the topic thoroughly enough.

• Determine your target market. This is the first thing you need to consider in composing your questionnaire.


• Structure the survey in such a way that the questions will follow a logical order and educe from general to specific.


• Use multiple-choice type of questions whenever possible. This helps the respondent understand better the purpose of your question and save time in completing the questionnaire.


• Avoid leading questions that might generate false positive response. E.G. “How satisfied are you by the service provided by our excellent waiters?” Instead, “How satisfied are you by the service provided by our waiters?”


• For questions requiring the respondent to rate the items, use the same rating scale all throughout your survey. If you use numerical rating from 0 to 5 or from 1 to 10, keep the same scale for all of the questions that require rating scale.


• Try to test the survey for at least 10 to 15 people before you produce it for mass distribution. After completing the survey, conduct an interview with these people to determine if your questions were easily understood and easy to answer.

Professionally conducted surveys can definitely help you improve results. There are Business Process Outsourcing or BPO industries nowadays that specialize market research survey and you can be assured of a valuable result. With the emergence of offshore BPO, outsourcing market surveys have helped a lot of businesses in assessing opinions, trends and competitors.