Registry May Help Marketers

The FCC's (Federal Communications Commission) ruling requiring that insurers and banks comply with a national Do-Not-Call (DNC) registry may not be all bad for these institutions and their marketing campaigns. The DNC indicator provides valuable insight about the customer that marketers should utilize as one of the drivers in ongoing customer interactions, reports Erin Kinikin, analyst, Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA), as well as the Forrester study "Do-Not-Call Registry Match Is Less a Burden on IT and More a Source of Customer Insight for Marketers."

"Essentially companies telemarket without focusing on what customers want," contends Kinikin. "The DNC list gives customers one way of indicating what type of communications they are willing to have with a company." Increased insight into a customer's communication preferences, predicts Kinikin, will put a larger emphasis on blended sales and services. "Instead of blind outbound calls, companies will get much better at making cross-sell or up-sell offers to customers at the time of service," Kinikin says.

As a result of compliance with the directory, which forbids a carrier from telemarketing listed customers, carriers will also be clued into a customer's marketing tolerance, contends Kinikin who expects that, as a result of the legislation, more Web, e-mail and direct mail marketing campaigns will take place.