Despite Do Not Call registry, company says there is still plenty of work
By: Lauren Otis
It’s been nearly three years since the national Do Not Call registry came on line, enabling people to register their telephone numbers so as to no longer receive telemarketing calls. So what happened to all those companies that made a living dialing your number just as you were sitting down to dinner?
No, they didn’t all just fade away into the woodwork or go out of business. Many, like Princeton-based AnswerNet Network are even thriving, according to Gary Pudles, AnswerNet’s president.
Mr. Pudles, 43, a jovial casually dressed man whose demeanor seems tailor-made for a career in sales and marketing, spoke recently from AnswerNet’s nondescript Witherspoon Street headquarters in Princeton (the nearest AnswerNet call center is in West Orange) about the brave new world of "teleservices" post-Do-Not-Call registry.
"The Do Not Call act devastated a lot of firms," said Mr. Pudles. Many did go out of business or were bought in a wave of consolidations. But many telemarketers evolved, using their experience with call centers to handle business-to-business telemarketing which was not affected by the Do Not Call act as well as consumer-to-business incoming call lines, handling everything from taking messages, to orders, information, help lines, what Mr. Pudles collectively described as teleservices.
AnswerNet is one of the largest telephone answering services in the country, with 55 call centers in 22 states and Canada, according to Mr. Pudles. Many businesses and professions do still rely on off-hours answering services staffed by live people, he noted. Three-quarters of AnswerNet’s business is in "inbound services," with 15 percent telemarketing and 10 percent "other forms of telesales."
And believe it or not, there are people out there who didn’t sign up for Do Not Call. "Our business to consumer telemarketing business has doubled in size since Do Not Call went into effect," Mr. Pudles said.
"Telemarketing is a consistently successful way of selling goods and services. If it weren’t, businesses wouldn’t do it," said Mr. Pudles. And, although the scale of telemarketing projects are smaller now, someone is picking up the phone, and buying, he added.
David Robbins, assistant director at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., said that since the Do Not Call registry was opened at the end of June 2003, over 122 million telephone numbers have been registered in the United States. In New Jersey, 4.1 million phones have been registered, Mr. Robbins said. "The program has been very successful," he said. Despite periodic rumors which circulate on the Internet, telemarketers are also effectively barred from calling cell phone numbers, according to Mr. Robbins, because of a federal prohibition on auto dialer use to call cell phone numbers.
"Compliance (with the law) has been good" among telemarketers, Mr. Robbins said, although the FCC has an active program investigating violations. To date, the FCC has brought 24 suits against telemarketers for Do Not Call act violations, and has collected $6 million in penalties and $6 million in other payments such as consumer reimbursements, according to Mr. Robbins.
Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president, government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association’s Washington, D.C. office, said there are about 120 million households in the United States, and the DMA estimates that "approximately half of them are on the national Do Not Call registry."
This has certainly led to a "dramatic reduction" in telephone sales, although some companies have been able to reposition themselves and remain viable, Mr. Cerasale said. Although there are far fewer people to market to, response rates among those who still haven’t blocked telemarketers seem to be better than before the registry, he said.
Not everyone wants to block telemarketing calls, Mr. Pudles said. "For most people (who haven’t blocked telemarketers) they’re happy to take the calls because they think telemarketers might have a good deal. We have really good offers from good companies," he said. Many telemarketing businesses are wanting to sell additional goods and add-on services to consumers who already are customers of their business, according to Mr. Pudles.
Asked about telemarketing’s poor and intrusive reputation, Mr. Pudles responded that "in every part of society there are good people and that is the most people, and then there are bad people." Telemarketers simply reflect society at large, he said.
Mr. Pudles is very upbeat about the future for phone-based business services, including sales. "I continue to believe the channel of selling goods and services over the phone is never going to go away," Mr. Pudles said. "Like anything else, as long as companies feel they are getting value for their dollars in terms of sales, they are going to continue to telemarket."

