Carphone warehouse Ofcom fine

Carphone Warehouse have been fined £35k by Ofcom for pestering people with silent calls.

Why is a company like CPW cold-calling people? I thought they did well because they had good, independent service in their stores. Surely cold-calling is just about selling on price? I mean, you are hardly going to persuade someone that you offer them really amazing service if (a) you are so desperate you are calling them out of the blue and (b) you have just disturbed their dinner to get them to speak to you.

And if you can only sign people up because you offer them a cheap one-off deal, then they are just going to switch to someone else when they later call and offer another cheap deal.

And, worse, what about all those people who you call who previously thought highly of you and now think much less of you because you have annoyed them? I bet companies doing the cold-calling thing just focus on the 1% of people (or whatever the figure is) who sign up in response to a cold-call, and don't factor in the impression they leave on the other 99%.

We often get calls from "CPW Business" (which is really Carphone Warehouse) at our office offering to "review our mobile bills". They call probably once a week, despite us asking them not to. Would I now consider CPW when we really do want to review our mobile bills? No, of course not. And why do they call themselves "CPW business" when Carphone Warehouse is such a strong brand? Is it because they think Carphone Warehouse is just a consumer brand? Or they actually want to hide the fact that they are calling from Carphone Warehouse so that the Carphone brand is not devalued in the minds of people (like us) who pretty much hang up straight away?