The Reed Business Publishing arm of Reed International Plc has spotted an opportunity to exploit its enormous database of names and addresses built up by the circulation departments of its array of controlled circulation trade magazines – 120,000, many of them gone away or dead, from Computer Weekly alone – to build a new business […]
The Reed Business Publishing arm of Reed International Plc has spotted an opportunity to exploit its enormous database of names and addresses built up by the circulation departments of its array of controlled circulation trade magazines – 120,000, many of them gone away or dead, from Computer Weekly alone – to build a new business in junk telephone calls. The company has set up Reed Business Call in Brighton to go out and look for companies that would like to have their products pitched over the telephone to an appropriate subset of the Reed database. And to implement the system, Reed has chosen Datapoint UK to provide an automated calling system – claimed to be the most advanced in the world. The system combines Datapoint’s Automatic Call Distributonand Edge telemarketing software, developed by Cerritos, California based Coffman Systems. The ACD 86 incorporates a Mentor 256Kb 32-bit Pick supermicro from NCR’s Applied Digital Data Systems in Hauppauge, New York. The machine is fitted with local network interface: interface circuits feature Granularity One, with each circuit serviced by its own interface board. Datapoint claims the system has a number of unique features, including Intermodule Hub, a network that handles call processing between modules, and Advanced Supervisor Console, a subsystem that provides alphanumeric system displays and colour graphic displays and representation of system operation. The Edge software is a menu driven telemarketing environment that is able to provide access to customer records, market segmentation data, cross-referencing, as well as allowing for an autodial system. Reed claims the system – which transmits voice and data communications simultaneously to the operator – permits 10,000 inbound or outbound business-to-business calls a day, and says the venture was prompted by the rapid growth in telemarketing, a $34,000m-a year business in the US, which here grew by 50% to UKP30m in 1987.
