Time to fulfil your unfulfilled desire — best apartments available in Gurgaon. This is just another telemarketing message that mobile-phone customers still get on their gadget, despite stringent guidelines to curb all commercial texts and calls that came into effect five weeks ago.
The SMSs are, sure, not confined to property advertisement. They can be about reducing belly fat, investing in insurance schemes or holidaying in a tourist resort.
Clearly, telemarketers are now using servers located outside the country. For, Telecom Regulator Authority of Indian (Trai) had, on September 27, put in place guidelines for curbing pesky calls and messages — after the earlier system of Do Not Call Registry did not meet much success.
According to experts, telemarketers have started sending messages from servers located in Africa and other regions, which will not come under the purview of Trai. The regulator received about 2,500 complaints within a month after laying out the guidelines. Out of 860 million mobile subscribers, about 160 million mobile users have registered for not receiving commercial messages and calls, according to information available with the Trai. The users can also selectively choose categories, if they want to continue receiving messages from certain segments.
On the other hand, the telemarketing guidelines might not have given full respite to the mobile subscribers, but it has definitely hit the businesses of small to medium telemarketers by 30-40 per cent.
Telemarketing companies, who send SMSs to the large data bank of mobile numbers they acquired over a period of time, have been affected significantly.
Although the unsolicited commercial communication on phone was banned much earlier, the telecom regulator made the rules stringent only recently, leaving telemarketers high and dry. By their own admission, telemarketing firms in India are facing crisis at this point.
True, many of them are looking at other viable options like targeting the email inbox of potential consumers (without getting diverted to the spam folder). “But, those hardly match the immediate appeal of SMS and cold call,” notes an executive of a telemarketing firm.
Another leading company is more forthcoming. Anuj Bairathi, CEO, Go4customers.com, a Noida-based telemarketer, says the business has been hit 30 to 40 per cent in value terms after the new regulations. The market size for this industry is estimated at around Rs 1,500 crore in India.
“The size of the market has shrunk,” he told Business Standard. “From an average of 100 calls a day till a few weeks ago, we are making maybe 50 to 60 now.” These are not yet registered with the do-not-call registry.
Bairathi fears the market will grow even smaller as more and more people turn to the do-not call option. “Email is the best and cheapest resort to reach out to the masses,” he notes. “But there’s concern over the message getting drowned in the spam folder.”
Most large telemarketers have a database of around 100,000 people. While earlier the entire list was useful, now only a fraction of it is as more and more people are getting into the NDNC list.
A Trai official says the regulator is continuously monitoring the situation. “We are addressing the complaints,” he adds.
Mobile operator Vodafone has even penalised telemarketing companies for making unsolicited calls to its subscribers and submitted Rs 50,000 with TRAI as fine. According to the new regulations, the telemarketers can be penalised by up to Rs 2.5 lakh.
Under the new regulations, subscribers can opt for either the ‘fully blocked’ category or the ‘partially blocked’ category, where they will receive commercial SMS as per their choice. “For registering under the ‘fully blocked’ list, a customer can either call 1909 or send SMS ‘START 0’ to 1909. DoT has allocated ‘140’ number series for both mobile and fixed-line networks, which will help users in recognising the commercial calls.
Trai had recently restricted the daily number of messages to 100, which was later doubled after requests from all the quarters.
Due to various issues, the regulator had earlier extended the deadline for implementation of guidelines to curb telemarketing calls thrice -- from January 1 to January 31, then to March 1 and finally April, this year. Now, it will be implemented from September 27.
Trai had suggested imposition of penalty up to Rs 2.5 lakh on erring telemarketing companies. Earlier, it was Rs 500-1,000. No commercial communication, even for unregistered customers, will be sent between 9 pm and 9 am, so that customers are not disturbed at night.
Out of the ambit of the new regulations will be transactional messages such as messages from banks/insurance companies or telecom service providers giving information relating to their customers’ accounts, or from airlines/railways to their passengers regarding flight/train schedules.
The country has over 850 million mobile and over 34 million fixed-line subscribers.
The Cellular Operators Association of India notes any system that needs full overhaul of network will take time to work in totality. “There would be glitches initially but as time progresses,” says its director-general Rajan S Mathews. “We will overcome all the problems just like we did in mobile number portability.”
It is “difficult” to monitor messages sent through servers outside, but “we will find a way out”, he adds.
