START GENTLY, LEAVE TRICKY QUESTIONS TILL LAST

Data Partnership’s David Light, pictured left, boasted to a Mail undercover reporter of the tactics used by his firm to coax information from people it cold calls. ‘WHEN you try and dig into people’s lifestyles or try to find out information, with all that goes on with credit card fraud and identity theft, people are a little bit reserved to give out certain information.

‘Like if you was to call me and say, “What’s your household income?”, I don’t wish to answer that. I don’t want to tell you what I’m earning. Because, I don’t know, you could be some lucrative crime gang, know where I live, know I earn over £50k a year, and you think right, well if he’s earning more than £50k a year, he’s probably going to have a nice car, he’s probably going to have some nice valuables in there.

‘So we find that when you get to them sort of questions, we leave them to the bottom of the survey. So at the top you have your typical questions which are nice and easy, warm questions to open up – How old is your main TV in your property? Is it less than one year, one to five years or five years plus? Which newspaper do you read? Do you have Sky through a satellite dish? Yes? OK, when’s your household insurance up for renewal? What month only. So soft questions.

‘When you start going more financial – how much you’re earning, would you like a [pension] review? – [they say] “No I’m not interested. I don’t want any sales calls. No, I’m going, bye”. They put the phone down.So we’ve only got the opt in for them answers what they’ve opted in.

‘If I’m honest, and I’m always honest, generally I think some people don’t realise that they’re going to get calls. I mean, we’re a business at the end of the day.

If you go, “You’re going to get 30 calls on the back of this”, you’re going to get a consumer going, “I don’t want to tell you any information”. It’s natural, it’s human nature.

‘If we was to then turn round and say at the end of the survey call, “Right you’ re now going to get 30 calls from this company, that company”, most of the people will probably say, “I don’t want it”.

‘Nine times out of ten they’ll probably say, “No I don’t want to be contacted by that company” because they know it’s going to be a sales call.’