Telemarketing Firms Surviving 'Do Not Call'

In the months before the national "do-not-call" list went into effect, Stuart Discount laid off more than 150 workers at his telemarketing company.

Now Tele-Response Center Inc. is back to full strength.

"We've done a good job of rehiring," said Discount, president of Tele-Response, which employs more than 500 people at its Philadelphia headquarters and two call centers in West Virginia.

The telemarketing industry appears to have weathered the creation of the list, which more than 63 million Americans have signed up for. A year after it went into effect, fears of massive layoffs and failures among telemarketing companies haven't been borne out.

People can register numbers on the list or file complaints at www.donotcall.gov or by calling (888) 382-1222.

Businesses that break the law face fines of up to $11,000 for each violation. The Federal Trade Commission has received more than 500,000 complaints against companies and is seeking legal action against four. (People still can receive calls from nonprofit groups, politicians and companies they recently have done business with.)

Discount said his company had adjusted to the do-not-call list by shifting toward fundraising for nonprofit groups and business-to-business sales pitches. Tele-Response has found enough new work since its 2003 layoffs that it is back to its former staffing levels, he said.

Some industry executives say telemarketers still face hard times. Tim Searcy, the American Teleservices Assn.'s chief executive, said he stood by his prediction that about 2 million of the industry's 6.5 million jobs would be lost because of the federal do-not-call legislation, including managers and other support personnel.

However, a recent study by London-based market analysis firm Datamonitor suggested that the do-not-call list would play a relatively small role in telemarketing layoffs when compared with technology advances and the outsourcing of jobs to countries such as India that have lower labor costs.

Estimating that there are about 4.3 million telemarketing jobs in 50,600 call centers of 10 workers or more, Datamonitor concluded that some 7,500 to 15,000 jobs could be lost by 2008 because of the do-not-call list.

Firms such as Discount's are more heavily emphasizing different kinds of telemarketing -- for example, taking on more customer service work, in which the call centers receive calls instead of make them. Telemarketers are also carefully targeting outbound calls to recent customers of companies, said Mark Best of Datamonitor.