A call center technology provider will donate 5 percent of the proceeds on its campaign management product to the American Teleservices Association's legal challenge against the national no-call registry, the company said yesterday.
TeleDirect International, Scottsdale, AZ, will dedicate the portion of revenue on its Liberation 6000 product to the ATA from this month until April 2004. The company would not disclose how much money it expected to give to the ATA, though it said it had made a minimum donation commitment and hoped to donate more.
TeleDirect will not use its pledge in marketing communications to its prospects, said Dean Brown, vice president of sales and marketing for TeleDirect. However, the company wants its customers to know it is interested in the continued viability of the telemarketing industry.
“We want the people we're dealing with, future prospects of ours, to know we're committed to the industry,” he said. “We're not going to get too carried away with the marketing.”
Brown said he is not concerned his company's outspoken support of the ATA's legal challenge will line it up for criticism by privacy and consumer advocates. The company's goal is to help telemarketers better target consumers with desirable offers and avoid nuisance calls, he said.
“We're trying to give our customers better tools to market to consumers and not bother customers,” Brown said.
The ATA has filed a challenge in federal court in Colorado against the Federal Trade Commission's plan to launch a national do-not-call list this summer. The Direct Marketing Association has filed a similar challenge in federal court in Oklahoma.
According to TeleDirect, Liberation 6000 is a campaign management system for customer acquisition, retention, upselling and cross-selling. It includes a predictive-dialer engine and agent interface with logical scripting and connectivity to back-end databases.
