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Unreceptive or even aggressive prospects have always been an overhead for marketing campaigns. An unwanted call or mailing is at best a waste of time and money and at worst can alienate the recipient.

On 1st May, 1999 the previously voluntary code of practice was enshrined in law. The Telephone Preference Service, The Corporate Telephone Preference Service and The Fax Preference Service now make it illegal to make a direct marketing call or send a fax to a consumer, sole trader or (except in Scotland) a partnership that registered with the scheme more than 28 days previously. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will enforce the law and the potential penalties are severe. Both the 28 day rule and availability of daily updates dictate that telephone numbers must be screened, at the very least, every 28 days and against the current version of the TPS file.

How does telephone preference service screening work?

You need only supply your telephone numbers although the addition of a unique reference number for your own match back purposes is always a good idea. We match your telephone numbers against the TPS file flagging or suppressing those numbers that have subscribed to the telephone preference service scheme. This is a fast and efficient service providing turnaround in minutes rather than hours.

The Telephone Preference Service forms part of our Data Cleansing Service, an example of what you can expect from this service is shown below:-

Example

You have the following data in your database:

This data is cleansed by the Telephone Preference service to:

As you can see from the example it is easy for us to check numbers against the TPS register. The first number in our example was registered on the Residential TPS register so we flag this with TPS. The second number was registered on the Corporate TPS register so we flag it as CTPS.

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