Ifbyphone Blog

It’s that time of year: the candidates are about to start calling your home in advance of the primary elections. Sometimes it’ll be pre-recorded messages; sometimes it’ll be “surveys” in which they ask you leading questions; sometimes it might even be utterly fake calls, pretending to be an independent entity taking a survey but with nasty insinuations about political opponents. Most of the smarter candidates have abandoned calls in which they impersonate their opponents, because they sometimes get caught; I suppose the really smart (but utterly amoral) ones might still get away with fake calls.

But if you’re like me, you don’t enjoy these calls. They’re annoying and intrusive; frankly, I try to avoid voting for candidates who go out of their way to annoy me.

What about your business? Political organizations have a legal loophole, but for businesses, blind telephone calls to consumers are illegal; the Federal Trade Commission just issued nearly $8 million in fines to companies that violated the Do Not Call list.

But forget the law for a moment — even if blind calls to consumers were legal, it would still be a bad idea. Sure the calls are cheap, and they can be automated; but how much ill will can your business stand? When I get email spam or an unsoliticted phone call from a company I cross them off my list permanently and won’t do business with then any longer.

If your company does make outbound calls, you’d better be absolutely certain that these calls are welcome.