Latest news with #coldcalling
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
AI Is Making Cold Calling Cool Again
If you're anything like me, your phone rings all day with one persistent caller: a shady character named 'Scam Likely.' Seriously, telephone spamming has become a modern plague. Our phones incessantly buzz with endless sales calls. In fact, YouMail's Robocall Index estimated 'U.S. consumers received over 4.8 Billion robocalls' in May alone, per Cloud Communications Alliance. Is it therefore any wonder that older generations complain about how Gen Zers and Millennials won't pick up the darn phone? The public is incessantly spammed so often, nearly everyone has been conditioned to ignore calls from someone they don't know. Or from that dastardly 'Scam Likely' character. This is a big problem for companies that rely on tele-sales. But just how prevalent is cold calling in 2025 anyway? Let's check the numbers. Is Cold Calling Still Alive in 2025? Lead generation company recently performed a 'data driven' report to assess cold-calling's business utility. It produced two key takeaways: 'Over 50% of B2B leads still originate from cold calling in 2025, making it a foundational channel in outbound strategies' and '49% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted via phone first, and 82% accept meetings from cold outreach, confirming buyer openness to calls.' is not alone in its positive assessment of telemarketing's effectiveness. A leading provider of business research and data, IBISWorld, estimates there are now nearly 50,000 telemarketing and call center businesses in the U.S. These grew at a 4.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2020 to 2025. And Cognitive Market Research projects 'the global outbound telemarketing market size will be USD 11524.8 million in 2025.' These numbers are nothing to sneeze at. Even so, it's worth asking: if so many businesses still depend on phone sales, what if there was a better way to get people to actually pick up? This is the problem a company named TitanX set out to solve using artificial intelligence. Cold Calling Reimagined with AI Recently, I had a chance to sit down with TitanX's CEO Joey Gilkey to discuss this issue. While so many companies are investing in AI agents to improve call center interactions, his organization is focused on another application: helping businesses discern who is most likely to answer a sales call. To this end, he and his team have established something called a Phone Intent Platform. 'Most spam calls happen because reps are operating in the dark,' says Gilkey. 'They're dialing through lists without knowing who's actually interested, ready to buy, or receptive to even being called in the first place. TitanX solves this by leveraging AI models trained on behavioral signals at the phone level, like phone activity patterns, consumer and business activity correlation at the person level, and technographic shifts to score prospects based on true intent.' One way to think of such precision filtering with real-time data is triage, a concept well-known to the medical world. An ER must decide who to care for in order of priority. If it treated every person who came in off the street with the same urgency, it would be a disaster. For instance, an expectant mother going into labor requires more immediate intervention than the person who comes in presenting flu-like symptoms. Certainly, both individuals require medical attention, but the former patient needs assistance right away versus the sick person who can certainly wait longer to be treated. The AI Caller Filter Difference Returning to TitanX, the platform is similarly filtering, making decisions about who to call—and more importantly—who not to call. But the AI assists sales reps in other helpful ways. The platform flags when someone is demonstrating reachability signals, so reps can reach out at the exact moment a conversation is most welcomed. Here's another way to think about it. 'Imagine your sales list is a haystack. Inside that haystack are a few needles,' says Gilkey. 'These are the people who will actually pick up the phone. Today's sales reps go straw by straw, dial by dial, hoping to find a needle. TitanX's AI sifts through the haystack first to hand you all those valuable needles.' From a technical standpoint, the platform draws from 12 proprietary signals, triangulating telecom data, consumer behavior and B2B attributes among other factors to answer three core questions. These queries can boost the sales conversion process: Armed with these insights, TitanX distills the data into a single actionable score: High Intent. This is the number sales reps need to know to better triage who would be most receptive to a sales overture. Personalization: Sales' Secret Weapon The Phone Intent Platform is but the latest installment of a broader trend toward personalization. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be found in marketing. Before social media's arrival, businesses would apply more of a 'spray and pray approach' to raise awareness of their offerings. Think about newspaper advertising. Years ago, a studio might take out a full-page ad to promote their new movie. Although the marketing agency might have some vague idea about the newspaper's circulation and readership, they could come nowhere close to the type of precision now available to social platforms like Facebook that can zero in on highly targeted audiences. Today marketers can design highly tailored campaigns that more effectively connect with particular demographics in jaw-dropping ways. That's not all. They can use sophisticated A/B testing and even lookalike audiences to drill down further. With increasing sophistication, they can even track ad engagement through metrics such as click-through rates and impressions, ensuring a given company's marketing efforts are not based on guesswork or gut feeling, but rather quantitative factors to optimize conversion. The Future of Sales Calls Returning to the value proposition of the Phone Intent Platform, what companies like TitanX are engaged in may be thought of as not some one-off gambit to find those prospects most willing to answer a cold call. Rather, it may be viewed in a wider context, as an evolution in how tomorrow's sales organizations improve outbound communication. All those people (myself included) who choose to ignore what they perceive as phone spam are wittingly or unwittingly sending marketing companies a not-so-subtle message: your sales pitch isn't working for me. Rather than continue to inundate the public with their own version of 'spray and pray' cold calls, tomorrow's businesses would do well to up their game, to learn from the move to personalization. Why? Because it works as evidenced by how many companies now use social media marketing over bygone blanket techniques like direct mailers. Such general appeals aren't just ineffective and wasteful, they're brand-damaging. At the end of the day, AI is reimagining how sales calls function. By pinpointing prospects most likely to pick up calls from the general population, businesses can better connect with people most likely to buy—rather than shooting in the dark. Moreover, AI-advances such as the Phone Intent Program reveal what's possible when we use increasingly sophisticated technology to enhance the human experience. By scaling personalization in unprecedented ways, tele-sales companies can stop frustrating the masses and instead seek out that gleaming needle in the haystack. With any luck, the person at the other end of the line they worked so hard to reach will say yes.
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- The Guardian
‘We got upset, then we got angry': the couple who took on one of the UK's biggest cold-call scams
Michael and Jan Reed can remember the moment their family business received its first indelible blow. It was 2015 and three of their regular customers were standing in the reception of their accident repair centre in County Durham. It had been a busy period and, unusually, all three had come to collect their cars at the same time. One had got a call from an accident management company trying to persuade him to make a personal injury claim. Unusually, the caller knew the make and model of the car and the date of the accident. The second man said the same had happened to him. By the time the third customer confirmed he had also got the cold call, the three of them were pulling out their phones. 'One of the guys said: 'Well, what number was it?'', says Jan, brow furrowed at the memory. 'They were just getting the mobiles out and saying this number, and then asking me if I knew it. I said: 'No, I don't know that number at all'. And they asked: 'Well, where did they get it from?'' The men did not have insurance with the same company, had used different brokers and their accidents were unconnected. 'And then all three of them turned around,' says Michael. 'They went: 'Well, it must be you guys.'' Cold callers are a nuisance, whether they are asking about repairs to your property or trying to persuade you to make a personal injury claim. But what happens when those calls threaten to bring down your business? Last month, after a 10-year investigation, eight men were convicted for their part in a conspiracy that ran one of the biggest nuisance call operations seen in the UK. The people who precipitated their downfall? A husband and wife from County Durham, who just wanted to protect their business. The 10-week trial at Bolton crown court, which brought to an end the largest investigation into cold calls carried out in the UK, shed light on a murky world. A jury found Craig Cornick, 40, a well-known businessman in the north-west, guilty of stealing personal data, having earlier found him and Thomas Daly, 35, not guilty of hacking into computer systems. Daly had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to steal personal data. Of the six remaining men, all admitted stealing data, and four admitted hacking into computer systems. The names, numbers and details of people involved in accidents may seem like rows on a spreadsheet, but they provide lucrative spoils. That information is sold to claims management firms hoping to generate leads for personal injury cases. The cold-calling gang targeted a million people and hundreds of accident repair garages between 2014 and 2017, according to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The Reeds' role in exposing them starts almost a decade ago, in 2015. The couple run Alan Reed Ltd, set up by Michael's father in 1970 and joined by Michael when he left school at 15. It is a family effort: Jan is in charge of customer care, her daughter Debbie does the accounts, and Michael's daughter Megan works in parts. After the painful confrontation with their three customers, the complaints kept coming, and the couple worried about their reputation. 'You get upset,' says Jan. 'Then we got quite angry about it, didn't we? Thinking, well, we're not to blame. We used to talk about it all the time. We were just going inside out with it.' They were not naive about data. They worked with bluechip insurance companies, and underwent training in how to protect personal information. They got their centralised IT car logging system, used widely in the industry, inspected twice, but were told nothing was wrong. They trusted their 40 staff – they had known half of them since they started as apprentices – but thinking they were the only garage affected, they started to wonder if they had been betrayed. After months of complaints, they had had enough. Michael remembers the exact moment. The couple were in the car and Jan was upset. 'I said: 'I can't do this any more, we've got to do something',' she recalls. But then she had a thought. 'I said: 'How about we put our information into the computer?' And Michael said: 'Right. We'll give it a go.'' They input their own numbers in spring 2016, alongside details of fictional accidents, and waited. At first, nothing happened. But then, 11 days later, Michael's phone started ringing. 'I literally walked through to say: 'Jan, I've got somebody on the phone',' at the same time Jan's phone rang, says Michael. 'I said: 'Just go and answer it,' and then we looked: it was the same number.' Michael spoke to the cold caller, asking if they knew the date he'd had an accident. When they confirmed the date, they put him through to a solicitor. Michael eventually made his excuses and ended the call. After a letter from the solicitors arrived, they were ready to go to the authorities. 'Obviously, we thought it was going to be over in weeks,' says Michael. 'We didn't think it was going to be nearly 10 years.' Andy Curry is the head of investigations at the ICO, which investigated and prosecuted the criminal case under powers bestowed by data protection legislation. He is not an excitable man, but when he talks about the scale of Operation Pelham, as the investigation was named by the ICO, his eyes light up. 'This is the biggest criminal investigation and prosecution the ICO has ever undertaken,' he says. Thanks to the information provided by the Reeds, alongside hundreds of other garages, ICO criminal investigation officers carried out nine raids in Macclesfield and Manchester in 2016. They seized 241,000 emails, 4.5m documents, 144,000 spreadsheets, 1.5m images and 83,000 multimedia files. Among the devices taken was an iPhone, which, according to the ICO's prosecuting barrister, 'opened Pandora's Box' and provided 'a clear window into the extent of the criminality' of the gang. Curry says: 'We uncovered a vast, murky criminal network where crash details were stolen from garages across England, Scotland and Wales and traded to fuel distressing predatory calls. It was an enormous and complex case.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Did it make these men rich? 'We think over £3m has been obtained through this activity,' says Curry. 'So, a fairly significant amount of money.' Evidence put before the jury painted a picture of a group of men who thought they were untouchable, boasting in texts about the personal data they could obtain. In a conservation from September 2016, one asks: 'Do you still get insurance data? I have someone interested in purchasing off you on a weekly basis bro.' The reply came 29 minutes later: 'Don't have anything for sale atm bro but just got a new kid who can get me anything I want from anywhere so soon as he up and running will let u know bro.' A few minutes later there was another reply: 'Decent u data King now haha.' Another key piece of evidence came in the form of a selfie video, filmed by Mark Preece, who admitted conspiring to hack computer systems and steal personal data. 'I've got the full garage list. I've got all the passwords for everything,' he says. 'All the data [...] I'm going to be rich, well, I am rich.' Curry says the messages were a crucial aspect of building the case. As for the video, it was a gift. 'When you watch this you think, how stupid do you have to be to film yourself basically admitting to a criminal offence on this large scale?' he says. 'But great for us.' Some of the men said they were involved in legitimate businesses. Thomas Daly and Adam Crompton, the directors of a now-dissolved company called Cheshire Finance UK, listed under 'call centres' on Companies House, had used their company to mask the 'purchase, sale and harvesting of unlawfully obtained data', the ICO argued in court. Cornick is listed as a director of 15 businesses on Companies House since 2013; nine have been dissolved, two liquidated and four are active. His listed address, a large mock Tudor residence with an electric gate and prominent CCTV, is in Prestbury, an affluent village in Greater Manchester known for its mansions owned by footballers and millionaires. In a statement after his conviction, Cornick said that during the period on which the trial focused 'data trading was a common industry practice' before regulations were tightened, 'reinforcing the need for businesses to closely scrutinise where their data originates'. He was 'relieved' to be cleared of computer hacking, but rejected 'any notion of wrongdoing' and said he would appeal against his conviction. There has been a clampdown on cold callers in recent years. The UK moved to ban cold calls offering financial products in 2023, so anyone being contacted out of the blue can assume they are a scam. But people are still bombarded with billions of unwanted calls every year. According to data from Hiya, a spam blocker service, UK residents received an average of three spam calls a month between January and June last year, equating to about 195m spam calls in the UK every month. Despite taking almost 10 years, Operation Pelham is not over. The ICO confirmed that one man, 33-year-old Jamie Munro, who is wanted on three counts related to the case, has disappeared and is thought to be overseas. And a second phase of the investigation is looking into the role of people in insurance firms and claims management companies. Curry says the ICO will continue in its efforts to 'untangle this web of illicit data trade. We will be relentless.' So what now? What consequences will this 'vast, murky criminal network' face? The ICO says it will go after any proceeds of crime; it will probably also push for a red flag to be placed on each of the conspirators, preventing them from becoming directors of companies in the future. However, all of the men are likely to avoid prison when they are finally sentenced next April. Offences under the 2018 Data Protection Act, including stealing data, are punishable by fines. Those convicted of hacking under the Computer Misuse Act will probably receive suspended sentences. 'We have no involvement in sentencing,' the ICO's legal team said. 'The court must sentence within the confines of the maximum sentence available in law.' Since it began, Operation Pelham has swallowed hundreds of hours of investigators' time. Asked why it took so long, the ICO said it was a complex case, and had been affected by the pandemic and a year-long adjournment. As to how much it cost, the body said it was carried out as part of its normal regulatory functions. 'We do not record costs for specific investigations,' a spokesperson said. Back in County Durham, the Reeds say they are proud of the role they played, but mostly they just want to get on with their lives. 'Businesses like ourselves are the backbone of this country. We need to stand up for ourselves and not get swallowed up,' says Michael. He shows a black and white picture of his parents, smiling outside the original garage. 'When you've been going for 55 years and you look at all the different things you've dealt with, well, this is just something in that timeline,' he says. 'It's been dealt with, we've dealt with worse. Everything we do is challenging – if it was easy, I don't think it would suit the Reed family.'
RNZ News
24-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
The Budget, vanguard v rearguard on AI, social media pushback
The media make a big deal of the Budget every year, even though the big money's already been announced. But what was in it for the media this year? Also: vanguard vs the rearguard on AI in the media; political push-back on social media and more bad language - and the perils of cold-calling folks live on air.
