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The adverse effect of cold calls

At best, receiving persistent unsolicited cold calls from companies you have no interest in doing business with is inconvenient and annoying. At worst, it can be a source of genuine stress and anxiety, particularly if your number has found its way onto the calling list of a firm that pays scant regard to Ofcom regulations on abandoned and silent calls.  


For the majority, cold calls are an unwelcome distraction, but vulnerable consumers, such as the elderly or disabled, can be left confused and distressed after receiving multiple uninvited marketing calls, to the point where some avoid answering the phone altogether.

Opting out of receiving marketing material when signing up for goods or services, asking for your details to be removed from a company’s database when you receive a cold call, and registering with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) will go some way to limiting the number of marketing calls you receive, but will do little to protect you from businesses that disregard the law or operate from overseas. The profit that can be made from telesales operations can dwarf fines issued by regulators, so some companies are willing to flout the law and take any fines they receive on the chin.

The only sure-fire way to avoid cold calls from overseas firms and rogue UK businesses is to use a call screening service. Once set up, a call screening service will protect you from the stress-inducing effects of unwanted marketing calls and abandoned or silent calls from contact centres, no matter where they’re based.

How much time we waste each year taking annoying cold calls

Seventy-one percent of UK landline users said they received a live marketing call during a six-month period in 2012, according to research from Ofcom. A separate study from the telecoms and media regulator conducted in 2013 found that 25% of a sample group were hounded with 10 unwanted calls a month.

The minutes or hours an individual consumer spends taking cold calls depends on how willing she is to engage with the person on the other end of the phone, but most people would agree that being forced to answer 10 unwelcome calls a month is an unreasonable demand on anybody’s time, even if you’re just telling salespeople where to go and hanging up.

Complaints to regulators about unwanted sales calls have reached record levels in recent years, suggesting that people are spending more and more of their time fielding cold calls. Nuisance call complaints to Ofcom and the Telephone Preference Service more than tripled between April 2011 and April 2013. But while regulators and MPs have paid lip service to dealing with the issue by promising to set up a system of fines to punish companies that make illegal cold calls, little serious action has been taken to address the problem.

The culture, media and sport select committee announced an inquiry into nuisance calls in July 2013, but as to whether its findings will result in legislation to adequately protect consumers from unwanted marketing contact from call centres remains to be seen.