Pain of Tele-Marketing Calls

Annoying telemarketing calls, especially in the middle of business meetings, hospital emergencies and overseas trips that refuse to spare even kids, are becoming a big concern, violating the privacy and piece of mind of cellular subscribers.

More terribly, the tele-sales person will have complete personal and private information about you, including your name, business and personal contact details, the bank where you have maintained your account, your company name and even balance of your account and the transactions you have made recently.

Obviously such information is like a heaven for a money lending salesman, who can use it for any good or bad purpose other than just selling his/her product.

Once your cellular number is exposed to tele-marketers, you will find that there are more calls you get each day. A notable increase in the ratio of marketing calls will be seen once you have posted a positive response to any package/product. This gives a clear feeling that these telemarketing companies share their data with-in their departments or even with other telemarketing companies likely to be based on barter system.

Banks arrange data from other sources as well, for instance hotels, restaurants, online communities and directories, yellow pages and from every that point where you leave your contact information for registration purpose or for any other reason.

Despite of the fact that these calls may not be that money-spinning activity for tele-marketers, decreasing tariff plans are fanning the fire with more affordable calls and text message rates, the number of telesales calls are increasing with each passing day.

Telemarketing calls involves privacy invasion and identity theft.

Solutions:

Mobile phone manufacturers can introduce a feature to restrict un-wanted calls. Currently there are numerous models, available in the market, which allow adding unwanted numbers into filter list. Nokia phones come with groups and an option to block a particular group’s calls. However these phones do not block the call instead they do not ring over a call from unwanted group.

Mobile phone manufacturers can come up with an exclusive feature to restrict unsolicited calls. This feature should include a stand alone memory to save all those junk number from which you do not want to receive calls. These phones are more likely to not log these calls; instead they should return automated voice message to the caller convening uninterested behavior of the consumer.

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has taken several but un-finished steps in order to stop SPAM communication in Pakistan. Authority also gave a tender advertisement in papers, asking solution providers for installation of SPAM filtering devices to filter unwanted calls and text message, but there has nothing been in concrete available as of now.

PTA has also talked about Do Not Call Registry, by summing up the regulation, but again, there is no such thing available as of today to block such callers or regulation available for the execution of such crimes.

Although regulator has been seriously addressing many areas for the comfort of consumer, but it has to take some significant action in introducing regulation for unsolicited calls too. PTA will have to keep in mind the current state of un-registered mobile SIMs in order to curb this discomfort; as those un-registered SIMs can be used anonymously by the tele-markers.


  • Dear Naeem,

    Its a very good analysis of the tele marketing. What I would like to say here is that most of the times tele marketing is considered to be the most cheap and easiest way of marketing and selling. Some times companies don’t have those huge budget allocations for using different available marketing and selling media. The idea of implementing a DNC list is good but we should also keep in mind that some people have their bread and butter attached to this industry. The best way would be create a set of regulations for this new- born TM phenomenon in Pakistan so that people attached with this industry also have some kind of incentive and consumer should also have all the rights to not to receive unwanted calls.


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