[Asterisk-biz] asterisk as outbound dialer only - follow-up/clarification on program

[Jeff Johnson]

First, let me apologize for not explaining how this tele-verification 
program might work. I hadn't expected the moral discussion, but would 
appreciate any feedback you have and suggestions for how to make it morally 
more acceptable.

This campaign (which is still being reviewed by Legal and does not operate 
today) would be to businesses ONLY. Do Not Call lists will be suppressed so 
that, in the event that it is a home-based business we are reaching and the 
owner is on the DNC list, they won't be called.

The purpose of this tool would be to verify business information so that 
when users (like you) go to search on MSN, yahoo, google, or whoever (not 
necessarily these particular search engines though it could be), for a local 
business in your area and find one, you reach only the businesses that are 
still around and have working numbers. The benefit to the business that we 
will be contacting is that people will be able to find them easier. Believe 
it or not, the primary reason for doing this is to make sure that users of 
the Internet have access to the highest quality information. Everyone hates 
calling a number and hearing a fax tone in their ear or that it's 
disconnected.

We don't yet know how the actual call will transpire. Ideally, we'll have 
text to speech system so that we can say 'We are calling to verify that your 
business name is 'ABC Company' which would be read from our database. Press 
1 to confirm or 2 to report a different information. Or press 9 to be 
removed from future verification efforts. It could quickly become a more 
complex system, which is why I just threw out the topic of saying 'sorry 
wrong number' which I highly doubt would pass Legal review. If a human picks 
up, we would likely say that we are calling to verify their business's 
information so that customers can find them, which is true.

The legal aspect of this is significant, and as mentioned, we are looking 
into what can be done within the laws, while also paying attention to the 
"niceness" factor (i.e., not be a nuisance call, but actually add value to 
the operations of the company we are calling). Nonetheless, some people will 
be annoyed, and rightfully so. But again, this would only be done on 
businesses, would have DNC numbers suppressed, and they could opt out as 
well, so we would be making reasonable efforts to not call businesses that 
don't want to be contacted.

We would also put our caller ID number up, as well as announce our number, 
so they could call back and remove their listing, update information, etc. 
Ideally we would have speech recognition so that we could actually update or 
verify the business name, address, type of business, though that opens up 
another can of worms altogether.

Hope that clears things up. Thanks for your input.