AMI Home Working Survey Rant

For the third time in 24 hours I’ve been telephoned by the same company, purportedly called AMI Survey, wanting to ask me questions about home working businesses in the UK.

On each occasion I asked for more details about the company.  On the first occasion I was directed to www.ami.com which turns out to be BIOS developer American Magatrends.  On the second occasion all I got was a link to a site with a one word link on it, which suffice to say I chose not to click.

This kind of telephone spam is a huge irritant.  Particularly when the company concerned takes no notice of repeated requests to remove you from their call list.  The Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which helps prevent junk calls, is only really relevant for individuals and sole traders, not that the TPS is particularly useful in a B2B context anyway. 

Cold calling is a legitimate business tool, but cold calling backed by poor systems, stupidity and failure to listen is hugely counterproductive.  I’m sure word will soon get around about AMI Survey’s lack of professionalism.  Not good for them, not good for their clients.

Sorry, rant over!

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk