Heavy competition for market share created a high demand for "sales
activity", which put the "Contact Centre" industry into a hive of activity
through "Direct Marketing" initiatives, like outbound calling. The
"Business-to-Business" and the "Business-to-Consumer" markets could
not get enough, no matter how much they received, they wanted more
and more. Suppliers reduced prices to get an advantage over their competitors",
which created a bigger need for sales for them to remain profitable.
The competition then reduced their prices to remain competitive.
Now all suppliers were not only fighting for market share but fighting
to remain in business.
To reduce costs some businesses attempted their own "Direct Marketing"
campaigns and found that they were the experts in their fields but
not so good at "outbound calling". When this started to cost more money
than anticipated many large corporations took their business offshore
to "India and the Philippines" as they could pay around three or four
dollars per hour per seat. This worked for divisions like technical
support, debt collection and for monopolies who had consumers that
did not have a choice.
Due to a series of things like the language barrier, cultural forwardness
and a few "media hyped" stories about "offshore call centre workers"
stealing from credit cards gained over the phone the Australian small
to medium businesses simply decided they would not respond to the calls.
Australian Telephone Company fined for Do Not Call breaches - Peter
Moon
Australian Telephone Company has paid a $101,200 infringement notice
for telemarketing to numbers on the Do Not Call Register more than
30 days after they were registered. ACMA announced its biggest scalp
yet under the new law, following an investigation into calls made by
an offshore call centre on behalf of the carrier. Inexplicably, the
carrier allowed illegal calls to continue after ACMA had raised concerns
based on several complaints.
"The investigation found that inadequate compliance systems,
procedures and supervision had contributed to calls being made to numbers
on the Register where the consumers were not existing Telstra customers."
Telstra may be the biggest Do Not Call catch so far for ACMA, but
it is not the record penalty payer. That "honour" belongs to Dodo at
$147,400.
Article published - August 18, 2009 View
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