The Telephone Preference Service, or TPS, is an 'opt-out' register which prevents individuals from receiving unsolicited marketing calls. It's a free and extremely useful service used by a huge number of people - an estimated 17 million - to avoid these inconvenient calls, even being put to use by companies. This is thanks to the fact that the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) was set up in June 2004, giving corporate businesses and organisations the chance to opt-out of being on the receiving end of unsolicited market calls. Also the legal definition of 'individual' includes SoleTraders and Partnerships (excluding Scotland), and so these have had the opportunity to register onto the TPS since May 1999. That is when the Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations1999 came into action, allowing people to register to the list. The British direct marketing industry administers the list on behalf of Ofcom. Read more
The Information Commissioner's Office is the UK's independent authority, which has been set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, in order to promote openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. With particular regards to the ICO's role in call centre regulation, the ICO are responsible for enforcing regulation in respect of marketing calls through the telephone preference service. Read more
A SIP Trunk is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service which streams media based on the Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is often used to control voice and video calls or other communication sessions over Internet Protocol. The protocol can be used to both create and terminate sessions, or modify them whether they be unicast or multicast or over one or several media streams. Instant messaging and online games also use SIP. Read more
A virtual call centre is a call centre that operates with all of the organisation's employees are geographically dispersed instead of working from one centralised location. This is typically done through employees working from home, or from many small locations. Below is a list of 10 things that should be considered when setting up a virtual call centre. Read more
TPS is an abbreviation of Telephone Preference Service, which is a service that was implemented in an attempt to allow individuals and businesses to register their request not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing calls. Individuals should register to the TPS, whilst businesses should register to corporate TPS. The TPS and CTPS are free services, and once registered, an individual or business should expect to not receive unsolicited calls within 28 days. Read more
The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a free service that allows businesses to register their preference not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing calls. The TPS regulations are enforced by the Information Commissioners Office, who have the power to enforce financial penalties of up to £500,000. In order to safeguard your operation from fines such as this, you should utilise a service such as TPS Compliant from Nexbridge, which works by performing a real time look up against the TPS database to ensure that the number being dialled isn't TPS registered. If the dialled number is TPS registered, then the service will automatically block the call from being made. Read more
The telecommunications industry has developed vastly since the introduction of the conventional telephone back in 1876. Among all of the infrastructure sectors, the most dramatic changes and developments are thought to have taken place in the telecommunication sector. Read more
With the vast number of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers that are promoting their services on the internet, it can be extremely difficult to make a decision on which service provider to select. This list of 10 questions will assist you in making the right choice for your business, and avoid you being contracted to a provider that is unable to meet your requirements for the next 12 to 24 months. Read more
ISDN is an acronym of Integrated Services Digital Network, which can be defined as a series of communication standards that allows the simultaneous digital transmission of data, voice, and other services over the public switched telephone network. The introduction of ISDN technology represented a move from analogue connectivity to digital, which offered significant improvements in quality. Although SIP (session initiation protocol) has been around for several years, it is only recently that advances in technology that have now made SIP an viable alternative to ISDN. The purpose of this article is to explore whether a business should replace ISDN with SIP. Read more
Historically, routing telephone calls was a manual task that was carried out by telephone operators using physical switchboards, but as technology improved over a number of years, this whole process has been replaced by purpose built computer hardware. More recently, with the emergence of VoIP telephony, technology has progressed to a level where a computer server is able to run custom software that allows it to handle and distribute telephone calls. This type of server is known as a Softswitch. Read more
