Things are changing in the world of outbound calling. Today’s consumers demand a very different type of contact. They are increasingly aware that they control which companies contact them and under what circumstances. Consumer power is increasing. In 2000, nearly a year after its introduction, 22% of UK consumers were aware of TPS. By 2005, awareness had risen to 59% and 71% of aware customers had already registered.

Furthermore the take up of services such as Caller Number Display (at 3.17 million) reinforces the fact consumers want to know who is calling them and, in many cases, are using technology to avoid answering unwanted calls.

Today’s consumers are also aware of supplier choice. Switching suppliers is like a consumer sport, and companies do not necessarily need to disappoint their customers before they leave to accept a better offer. Research shows that getting outbound calls or customer service wrong, is a sure fire way of driving customers to a competitor.

For example a major European financial services company found that defection rates had reached 12% (3 times the industry average) for their highest value customers because they were irritated at being sold to directly after making contact.

The impact of consumer control on the outbound contact centre market is best illustrated by the increase in registrations for the TPS and caller number display. By November 2005, 45% of UK households were registered for the TPS, and this is increasing at a rate of 112,000 per month. It is inevitable that with increasingly savvy consumers we will see similar uptakes in preference services for other channels, such as email and SMS, in the coming years.

For example over 3.1 million BT customers subscribe to caller number display, allowing them to see who is calling before choosing to answer. Of these, 168,000 automatically block anonymous callers.

Increasingly, consumers expect to control whether and how they are contacted, and are willing to switch supplier instantly due to poor service. As a result the days of telemarketing as an indiscriminate “numbers game” are long gone, replaced by CRM, data profiling and customer retention strategies.

For example consumers have become so discerning that 50% have switched to another service in the last year because of poor customer service from contact centres.

At the start of November 2005 TPS registrations stood at 11.3 million – nearly half of all households with landlines, At the same time, leading management consultancy CM insight predict that TPS registrations will approach saturation (100%) by 2009, tolling the death of unsolicited cold outbound calls.

Even more disturbing is the fact that a high number of TPS registrations are the very types of consumer that most companies want to reach – those with ABC1 BAND, home owners, in full time work, and with high disposable incomes.