Issues 22: A Fine Mess A FINE MESSONE OR TWO reports of telesales calls resulting in fines are starting to become one or two dozen. TPS is starting to bite? For anyone who’s been living in Osama bin Laden’s cave, and doesn’t know what’s going on, TPS is the Telephone Preference Service. It can cost serious money to learn about it.One company found out about it the hard way, having made TWO calls - both on the same day - and was told it was being hit for FIVE grand. Expensive lesson, that! Here’s a FREE lesson, then. TPS is available to anyone who’s fed up with unsolicited telesales calls. It applies to private phone line subscribers, Sole Traders and Partnerships but not to Limited Companies. What you really do need to know, if you’re looking to cold call some businesses, is precisely what sort of businesses they are. And Yellow Pages doesn’t tell you that! It takes a lot of time and skill to ensure your database is accurate, and the incentive to get it dead right is the sure knowledge that, if you don’t, it’s going to cost you. From now on, it really does matter whether your record says Bloggs and Co, or Bloggs & Co Limited. The difference between one and the other can be £5,000. Concentrates the mind a bit, doesn’t it? So, if you’ve left the updating of your data for one of the girls to do in her spare time, she’d better have some very specific guidelines about what she’s expected to achieve. After all, if she gets it wrong, it costs you five grand, and there’s not much point in blaming her. Easy peasy? Don’t count on it. There’s a company in Yorkshire that calls itself a PLC - rightly or wrongly - but, when they received an unsolicited call, they swore blind that they were covered by TPS. Given that such an option isn’t available to PLC’s, this took a bit of figuring out. And we don’t have the answer yet, which is probably just the way the like it - to be on the safe side, their name gets knocked off the list.
LOG ON or BOG OFFTHE NICE THING about Windowbase’s website is that it does far more than tell you about our data. It’s a goldmine of useful information. There are all sorts of Information Data Sheets there, offering sound practical advice, and all Free of Charge.If you need to know more about TPS and FPS, just log on to www.winbase.co.uk Buy one, get one free, is generally known as Bog Off. When it’s a couple of Viennettas for the price of one, there are no strings attached. You can, quite literally, walk into Iceland, put two Viennettas in your basket, and pay for only one. It would be nice to think there were plenty more offers like that but, most of the time, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Once your starting point is £5,000 for your first fine, ask yourself what you get for your money. Answer: a hard lesson. Surely, if the risk of being hit is getting greater every day, the chances increase of being a few grand down, with nothing to show for it. What you need is insurance. The trouble with insurance is that, in some cases, it’s so expensive you’d rather take the risk. Windowbase customers don’t have this problem because, every month, they receive FREE OF CHARGE the latest list of who’s registered with TPS. They take accurate data, with the bonus of being told which records can be cold-called and which can’t. Can’t say fairer than that. In other words, Windowbase data is working for you in two ways . . . 1. You’re getting loads of important sales-oriented information about the businesses, complete with correct postal addresses, phone and fax numbers, contacts, plus loads of other facts about what they’re doing; 2.The TPS list is your safeguard against a fine (or more than one fine) in the event of someone being registered.
Accurate data, including who’s registered with TPS and/or FPS, costs a lot less than five grand. GET YOUR FAX RIGHTNOT ONLY is there TPS, as described above, but there’s also FPS - the Fax Preference Service. You’d be forgiven (if only!), for thinking the same rules apply . . . but they don’t.Anyone, absolutely anyone, can register with the FPS. Private citizens, sole traders and all the biggest companies in the land. Not only can they all guard against unwanted faxes on their fax lines, but they can do it on their phone lines, too. Bit of a problem, that. Hardly your fault, you might think, if you mistakenly tried faxing to a phone line, got no result, but still found yourself in trouble. Sorry, but that’s just tough. The FPS is there to protect people and not everyone thinks things out enough to foresee some of the possibilities. Let’s take an example . . . in the Yellow Pages is a display advert for a window installer. Everything about it says, when you want windows, they’re worth a call. That display advert has done its job, and it didn’t cost too much extra. Customers think they’re dealing with a major player. Is there any reason to suppose it isn’t a One Man Band with enough sense to spend a few extra quid on a decent advert? If it is a One Man Band, this is where you really can (and sometimes do) get into trouble. He has one phone line - apart from his mobile - that Mrs One Man Band, the good lady wife, can use as well as taking sales enquiries during the day while Mr One Man Band is out installing windows. Mr One Man Band might need to fax orders to his suppliers, so he gets a machine that takes messages and does faxes. He can register his phone line with FPS and this is why he might want to . . . Next to the bed is a phone (as mentioned in Issues last time round) that the wife uses to call her sister in New Zealand. When that phone rings, THREE TIMES, during the night, waking them both up, they get a bit brassed off when it’s some daft fax beeping. And that’s when they register with FPS. (Actually, her sister lives near Toronto and, just as actually, someone in Scotland has been trying to fax on a line that has no fax.)
IT WORKS BOTH WAYSTRY FAXING Pilkingtons, Boots or anyone and, if they don’t like it, and have registered with FPS, your unsolicited offer of a free house-ful of windows with every conservatory will not only fall on deaf ears, it will cause you grief.And why would you want to phone Boots? Well, you wouldn’t be doing so knowingly. It just takes one digit to be wrong on someone’s database, though, doesn’t it? Everyone’s doing their best to handle dis-gruntled telephone line subscribers. They have to, these days. Ring a Helpline with a complaint, tell them the number that’s trying to fax you, and they investigate it. You can’t ring (or fax) back on the number that’s faxing you because of the way it’s set up. All the complainant gets is a reassuring message that whoever makes that annoying fax transmission is doing so by mistake, and that they don’t mean any harm by it, and that they’ll be told it causes a problem. So they register. What happens otherwise? Bugger all, actually. Nothing changes, so FPS is the only solution. To sum up, then:
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