Calling Back Website Leads and the Do Not Call List

The same number, two different calls

In October a homeowner asks for a quote through your website. You call the next morning. That call answers a request, and nobody would call it telemarketing.

In April someone suggests a spring campaign: phone everyone who asked for a quote last year and did not go ahead.

Same number, same person, different call. A sales call months later can fall under Canada's telemarketing rules and the National Do Not Call List.

What follows is general information about how those rules work, not legal advice.

What the rules cover

The National Do Not Call List lets people register home and mobile numbers they do not want telemarketers to call. The CRTC sets the rules and enforces them.

A telemarketing call, for these purposes, is an unsolicited call to sell or promote something. A business making such calls must check numbers against the national list unless the call is exempt.

Exempt or not, telemarketing calls also come with other duties: keeping an internal list of people who asked not to be called, saying who is calling, and calling only within set hours.

The exemptions that matter here

• An enquiry exempts calls for six months afterwards.
• A purchase, lease or rental exempts calls for eighteen months.
• A written contract counts while it runs, and eighteen months after.
• Express consent to be called, given and recorded.
• Calls to businesses fall outside the national list's rules.

The first is where small businesses most often slip. An enquiry made in October stops covering sales calls in April.

After that, if the homeowner's number is on the national list, a promotional call needs another basis, such as express consent.

When the clock starts

The six months run from the date of the enquiry, not from the date of your quote or your last follow-up.

A new enquiry restarts it. A completed job starts the eighteen-month period that comes with a purchase, and a quote that was never accepted does not.

None of this can be worked out later without a date on every lead. The form's notification email carries one; copy it into wherever leads are kept, alongside what each person asked about.

Your own do-not-call list

Every business making telemarketing calls needs an internal do-not-call list, including businesses whose calls are exempt from the national list.

When someone asks not to be called again, their number goes on it. The rules set a short deadline for adding it and require keeping it on the list for years.

Keep the list where everyone who makes calls can see it, with the date of each request. A spreadsheet beside the phone is enough for a small business.

Consent on the form

A website form can ask for express consent directly, with a separate box the visitor ticks to say they would like calls about future offers.

Leave the box unticked by default, and keep it apart from the quote request so nobody agrees by accident.

A short line beside the box, saying what kind of calls to expect and how to stop them, makes clear what was agreed to.

Record the answer, the date and the wording shown at the time. That record is what allows a call long after the six months have passed.

A worked example

A two-person company that renovates powder rooms, the small half-bathrooms off a front hall, wins most of its jobs from enquiries sent through its website.

Over the past year, dozens of homeowners asked for quotes and did not go ahead. In March the owner planned to phone all of them with a spring offer.

First his bookkeeper pulled the date of each enquiry from the form emails. Many were more than six months old, a few had since become customers, and two had asked never to be called again.

He called the recent enquiries and the past customers, put the two refusals on a list beside the phone, and set the older numbers aside until they could be checked against the national list.

The quote form now has a separate box asking whether the homeowner would like a call about future offers, and the answer goes into the lead record with its date.

Calling hours and introductions

Telemarketing calls to consumers are limited to weekdays from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and weekends from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., in the time zone of the person being called.

The caller has to say at the start who they are and on whose behalf they are calling, and be able to give a way to contact the business.

Neither rule is difficult. Both are easy to forget when a campaign is run from a list in the evening, after the day's work is done.

Email keeps a different clock

The same lead may also be on your email list, and CASL has its own periods for implied consent: six months from an enquiry, two years from a purchase.

So a customer who bought last spring can be emailed for two years but called under the purchase exemption for eighteen months. Keep both dates, and check the right one for each channel.

A spreadsheet with one column for the enquiry date and another for the purchase date covers both.

The counter-case

A business that only ever calls back new enquiries promptly, about the job they asked for, has very little to change beyond keeping an internal list.

A company selling only to other businesses, calling business numbers, is outside the national list's rules, though the duty to keep its own list of people who asked not to be called still applies.

For anyone planning to call older leads to sell, though, record when each enquiry came in, check the national list where the exemptions have run out, and keep your own list.

Before the spring calls

1. Record the date of every enquiry.
2. Note purchases and contracts with their dates.
3. Add a separate consent box to the form.
4. Start an internal do-not-call list today.
5. Sort old leads by date before calling.
6. Check older numbers against the national list.
7. Call only within the permitted hours.

Step one carries all the others. A lead with no date cannot be checked against the six-month or eighteen-month periods, so every call to it has to be treated as if no exemption applies.

Email has its own version of the same rules, covered in the first CASL penalty and the lesson in it.

Frequently asked questions

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