Well, this morning's news programs all carried the "big news" that now, the dreaded, evil robocalls will finally come to an end! Great news! The FCC is coming to the rescue of millions of Americans who simply cannot tolerate an unsolicited call on their PHONE! Oh the horror!
I got a couple of emails this morning from customers who were concerned about this dramatic news story. There was a problem with the story: It is NOT news. There's simply nothing "new" about it. Both the FCC and the FTC had been charged with regulating pre-recorded calls sent through the phone system. This is one of the many services of GroupCallerTM our flagship product. For many years now, the FTC has been enforcing the very same rules cited in today's "big" news stories on this subject. The only real difference now is that the FCC has the authority to regulate "INTRA-state" calls, whereas the FTC could only regulate and enforce "INTER-state" calls. Other than that, I don't see any change at all.
We're an FTC-compliant shop. That means, in all respects we endeavor to comply with all the FTC rules and regulations pertaining to all our services. When making voice broadcast calls, we only call phone numbers on which written permission was given to make such calls. Naturally, the available list is limited. There are "only" about 50 million such numbers in the USA after subtracting duplicate numbers and all of the numbers in the national Do Not Call registry . "ONLY." Naturally, there are many, many people making pre-recorded commercial soliciations by phone with the use of similar equipment and software, but without the requisite written consent. I'm sure that's what led the FCC to copy the FTC's rules. A number of these operators (mostly very small companies, I suspect) only made such calls within their own state. This would effectively render the FTC rules unenforceable, assuming the small operators could afford legal counsel to fight a prosecution.
As far as we're concerned, today's big announcement does not affect us in the least. We're already in compliance on the FTC rules, which makes us automatically in compliance of the FCC rules. Here is a story from CNN that you can read for yourself.
Also, it appears this year, a great deal of our marketing emphasis will be geared toward our newly rolled-out Hosted Call Center which uses the Predictive Dialing mode of GroupCallerTM. Since this mode only utilizes live operators, these rules won't apply to that service anyway. Please feel free to contact me if you should have any further questions on this news story.
Robocalls is one of the headache of some people,in Finland they already fix those issue specially to those telemarketers,in part of Helsinki telemarketing is one of the popular not on giving a annoying things but giving services for people who are interested.
Posted by: Pirkko Puurunen | October 01, 2012 at 02:28 AM