Unsolicited calls

Two unsolicited calls today on my home phone, which is registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). One caller identifies himself as working for 'various financial companies', the other for 'different financial companies'. They pronounce the 'various' and the 'different' very indistinctly to try and cover up the fact that they haven't introduced themselves properly. They want to make an offer regarding mortgage interest rates. Both are using a very low quality connection and refuse to state who they represent. They won't say who asked or told them to call me.

A UK regulated financial services company should not be making unsolicited outbound calls. It knows that this carries penalties, and increasingly will ask customers to sign up to receive a regular call from an adviser or an account manager. Product design may include a provision for calls from time to time. So a company may sometimes make a mistake, but it will try hard to avoid repeating it. If you don't want to be bothered, just tell them clearly that you don't want to hear from them again.

An unregulated company based abroad has few constraints apart from penalties that may arise if any misuse of the telephone system is proven. The best thing to do is to tell these people to get lost - and don't call again.

TPS advice is as follows

Companies based abroad who call into the UK and who are making calls on behalf of a UK based company, must comply with UK regulations and screen their call lists against TPS before making an unsolicited sales and marketing call to a UK telephone number. We do make the file available to overseas based companies under licence for the purpose of suppression so they know whom not to telephone but many overseas companies who telephone the UK on their own account from overseas do so to avoid legal and self regulatory restrictions. We would advise caution in responding to unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls from overseas especially if they are asking you to send them money or using a premium rate phone line (numbers beginning with 09). If you are receiving unsolicited sales and marketing calls from overseas you should contact the overseas company who is making the call.

Just ask - which company's products are you selling? If there's no straight answer, it's either a scam or a very stupid sales approach. In either case, you really want nothing to do with them.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 survey

Another poor online survey - this one by Adobe, who would like to know whether my company might or might not upgrade to Adobe Acrobat 8.0 at some time in the next year.

Amongst the horrors

Server errors when I first tried to respond - this makes a great impression

No Back button on each page to allow mistakes to be fixed; after a few uses of the browser's Back button, it got its knickers completely in a twist

Radio buttons with the instruction "please click all the reasons why..." - of course a radio button only allows you to click one

Inadequate list of business activities; although the Industry List includes Management Consulting, there's no selection in Principal Activities for consulting or project management, which is what I actually do

It didn't bother to ask if I recommend software for customers and if so, what the scale of this might be

Asking for a phone number for follow-up questions (no format indicated) and then refusing to accept a number in UK format or in +44 format

The people that put this survey together probably cost Adobe lots of dollars (or euros). It lookes to me as though a few dollars more, spent on proper design, review and testing, could have have given their marketing people some much more valuable results.