Let’s assume you’re free and single and in a bar looking for some action with a member of the opposite sex (or same sex actually as we’re not homophobic here. Oh no, many of our readers seem to come from a certain gay chat room according to our logs, and very welcome they are too).
There’s a choice of 2 candidates you can choose from. You know that one of them will be open-minded to your approach and you have a pretty good chance of success. But the other one will slap you in the face, scream "looser" and stomp off and tell their friends how you harassed them.
What person in their right mind wouldn’t want to know that information, before making their approach?
Well, a very similar situation is happening in response to BT’s latest initiative – BT Privacy. (BT is the UK’s largest and incumbent fixed landline operator, by the way). BT Privacy offers to sign its customers up to the Telephone Preference Scheme (TPS), which bars telemarketing people from calling them anymore.
This is being greeted with howls of indignation among the telemarketing industry. But you’d think that they’d welcome it wouldn’t you? The call centres wouldn’t be pissing people off and they’d have a higher conversion rate to boot, as they wouldn’t have to talk to people who definitely weren’t going to buy their products and services.
But no. These traditionalist marketers are so wedded to an interruptive model (and it’s hard to know what could be more interruptive that a phone calls when you’re eating supper) that they can’t see that this model is deader than a dead thing on Planet Dead. Idiots!
As for BT, they should be applauded. This initiative could really be a result of listening to what their customers want. On the other hand, it would be a canny way of preventing their competitors from poaching their customers.
Either way, it’s a smart move.
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