Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC) are communications made to subscribers without their knowledge or willingness via voice calls or SMS. Apart from being inconvenient, such communications also have an impact on people's privacy.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued the Telecom Unsolicited Commercial Communications Regulations (TUCCR), 2007 dated June 5, 2007, which established a framework for regulating UCC. In 2010, these regulations were reviewed, and in 2017, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued new regulations called as Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR-2010, TCCCPR- 2018).
According to the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR) 2018 guidelines released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), a person or legal entity engaged in the activity of transmission or delivery of commercial/service-related communication is classified as a Telemarketer. To prevent customers from receiving unsolicited commercial communication, TRAI has revised the rules for telemarketers and enterprises for sharing bulk SMS/Voice calls services in India.
Telemarketers must be registered on the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platform of an Indian telecom service provider (i.e.: Airtel, Jio, VodaIdea, etc.) according to TRAI 2018 regulations. It is mandatory for all entities/companies that share communication messages with their customers/new leads, such as OTP, verification codes, notification, promotional messages, and so on, to be registered in the service provider DLT platform.
Telemarketing Registration process:
The new telemarketing registration process is classified into two categories:
Registration as a Principal Entity (PE): A person or legal entity directly dealing/ sending SMS or voice to the customers must be registered with the telecom operators in the DLT platform.
Registration as a Telemarketer: Any person or legal entity that directly collects SMS/voice traffic from enterprises/companies and sends SMS or makes voice calls to the end customers on the behalf of the enterprise/company.
For providing telemarketing services, Telemarketers and their Principal Entities (PE) need to register on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform of any of the registered Indian Telecom Service Providers (TSP).
For further reference kindly refer to the attached TCCCPR-2018 guidelines with this blog.