COMMERCE, Science and Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell is now acknowledging a possible fall-out in Jamaica’s international telemarketing industry, following last week’s decision by the US Congress and Senate to pass legislation to ensure that the American consumer can block unwanted telemarketing calls via a national registry to which millions have already signed up.

“It is going to result in a fall-out because the businesses are going to be a lot more timid and less aggressive in telemarketing,” said Paulwell.

According to the minister, Jamaica-based telemarketing firms “will now have to have a database so that they do not make the mistake of calling these 50 million people (who are believed to have signed on to the do-not-call list in the last four months)”.

“So that could be a major headache for a business, especially if their data capacity can’t store 50 million names, because that is a hell of a lot of data to put into their system,” Paulwell added as he conceded to the Sunday Observer that the US legislation had not come as a surprise to telemarketing firms in the island.

Paulwell was reported Friday as downplaying the potential impact of the do-not-call list, saying that Jamaican businesses had already started to make the shift from those outbound calls to inbound calls.

But in a second interview with this newspaper, he acknowledged the difficulties it could pose.

“It is going to mean a tremendous challenge initially for businesses in Jamaica and it might very well mean a slowdown in the short-term until they are able to get their act together and to incorporate into their database and their predictive dialling systems a purged list. So that is a major, major problem,” he added.

The US Congress and Senate almost overnight passed legislation giving effect to the so-called do-not-call list that telemarketing firms say could drive them out of business.

The list was expected to become operational next Wednesday but must now await legal proceedings following a US district judge’s decision to grant opponents a stay of execution.

But even with a fall-out if the list eventually becomes reality, Paulwell sees a silver lining behind the proverbial dark cloud. The reason — a purged list of customers would help to eliminate the wasting of time calling people not interested in buying to begin with, as well as the cost incurred from the call itself.

“It will be illegal to call certain numbers. But I also believe that because you are going to know who don’t wish to be called, then you would assume that the remaining 60-odd million or so Americans would be receptive,” he said.

“Right now, one of the difficulties with telemarketing is that you call people and they hang up on you and that’s a wasted call,” Paulwell said. “If you assume now that these people who normally hang up on you are now on the list that you won’t call, then it means that you would have a better list to call, that is, the people who you do call would be a lot more receptive,” he said.

Additional foreign investment was yet another good thing the minister foresaw from this new list that is to be effected next Wednesday.

“It (the list) is going to chase a lot of companies offshore, in the US, because it will be easier to catch them in the US if they operate outside of the US. But it doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be guilty of an unlawful act of the US government,” he said.

Those possibilities aside, Paulwell said it was now critical for telemarketing firms to make the transition from outbound to inbound calls, a position he articulated in Friday’s Weekend Observer. He said that while the outbound system made firms money, security rests with the inbound calling system.

“The amount of money that you earn per sale (with outbound work) is far greater than the type of revenue you would generate from inbound work,” Paulwell said. “It is far more lucrative, but it is not as secure. It really depends on your people, how aggressive they are, how persistent they are in achieving sales and Jamaicans have been doing very well and can compare with North American people in this area. But I don’t believe it is the secure way to rest our future.

“My advice to call centres in Jamaica is that we all now need to make the shift into inbound work and there is a lot of inbound work out there where you perform customer service functions like, for example, Sitel (Caribbean Limited) has a client called Philips. So I, as a customer who purchases a Philips washing machine and it develops a problem, I am going to call Sitel in Jamaica to have the problem remedied and that is the type of work they do, with their over 700 people. That is what we now need to encourage. There is a lot more work there and a lot of the jobs in the US can be exported into Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean,” he said.

Besides Sitel Caribbean, other companies are taking the minister’s advice. TeleServices Jamaica Limited, with branches in Montego Bay, St James and Portmore, St Catherine and which employs some 500 people, is one such company.

Wilfred Baghaloo, who heads up the company, told the Sunday Observer that in the last year-and-half they had been working at the transition from outbound to inbound. And at present, outbound calls account for only 15 to 20 per cent of their operations, from which he said he was expecting a five per cent fall-out, because of the do-not-call list.

“From our end at TeleServices, I do not anticipate any major impact on our operation…” Baghaloo said. “We are now positioning ourselves to go into the higher end of the market, which is our inbound work, which is where we are migrating to. But the do-not-call list would not affect us because the customers that we service are tier one clients like AT&T and we are servicing their existing customers.”

He said TeleServices has a small amount of general call centre work, but not that much, “maybe anything between 15 and 20 per cent of general call centre work and it is from that 20 per cent that we are expecting the five per cent fall-out (initially)”.

As to whether workers would lose jobs, he said he did not expect that this would be so in light of their progress toward inbound calls.

“I don’t think so, because we have started going into the inbound, which is the higher end of the business and we have been moving to that pretty fast this year. We have prepared a bid contract for some inbound work that will come in October,” he said, adding that it was the company’s third inbound contract over this year.

Further, he said getting the organisation prepared for the work would not involve any significant injection of capital since it really came down to training workers.

“At TeleServices we will not have to make any significant capital expenditure for inbound. What we have to do is make an investment in training our workers because inbound is the natural state that you end up when you start your outbound work,” he said.

Added Baghaloo: “To give you inbound work you have to have confidence that you have a management in place, that you have trained workers in place, that your facilities are okay and that takes time and that’s why it has taken us almost a year-and-a-half to get inbound contracts, and it does take time to get into the inbound market.”