Retries and Hand-Over: The Rules for Chasing a Lead Who Does Not Pick Up

What do the UAE rules say about calling a lead back?

Rule. Cabinet Resolution 56 of 2024 defines telemarketing as phone calls a company makes to a consumer to market, advertise or promote its products or services, and includes marketing text messages and messages on social media apps. Article 5 then sets the calling controls for those marketing calls.

Rule. Resolution 57 lets the authority give a warning, a fine, a suspension of activity for 7 to 90 days, or cancel the licence and cut the phone service, in that order of gradation. It may skip the gradation and impose the most severe penalty if the same violation recurs within six months of a penalty. The full table is in our penalty table post, and the hours rule is in the 9-to-6 post.

The text of Article 5(5) leaves a question open. It does not say whether the first, unanswered call counts toward the two a week. Our reading is that it limits callbacks, so one unanswered call and then at most one callback a day and two in a week. Treat that as a cautious reading, not a ruling.

Does the callback limit apply to a lead who asked to be called?

Rule. Resolution 56 defines "unwanted marketing phone calls" as marketing calls made in violation of the resolution, and says they do not include marketing calls made at the request of the consumer.

Practice. We read that as splitting leads into two groups. The first group asked to be contacted: they filled in a form asking for a call or a quote, or messaged you to ask. A call to them responds to their own request, which is the position our earlier posts take. The second group did not ask for a call: they downloaded something, answered a quiz, or joined a list and never said "call me". Calls to them are marketing calls, and all of Article 5 applies. If you are unsure which group a lead is in, treat them as the second.

How does a five-try schedule fit these rules?

MAJ Leads follows up a lead with up to five tries, inside the working hours your company sets: now, 15 minutes later, 1 hour later, 4 hours later, and the next working day at 12:00. That is four tries in the first day. It fits the first group of leads and not the second. The schedule is fixed, so MAJ Leads is for people who enquired with you and is not built for cold calling, as the five-attempt cadence post says. If a lead was not one who asked to be called, do not route them through it.

Practice. Two stop rules matter for either group. An outcome of "Not interested" ends the schedule at once in MAJ Leads, with no further tries, which lines up with Article 5(4)'s bar on calling back after a refusal. And the last try is the last: if it goes unanswered the schedule stops rather than adding a sixth, and a reply from the lead reopens it.

Does calling more often help?

The evidence is thin. The Lead Response Management study summary (InsideSales.com and Dr James Oldroyd, 2007) says that after 20 hours every additional dial hurts the chance of making contact to qualify a lead. It then says the authors do not know why, and asks whether other media would warm the lead up. It is a vendor summary of six companies' phone data, so treat it as a caution about piling on calls, not as a number to plan around. We do not have our own data on how many tries help, and we do not claim a figure.

What should a hand-over look like when a lead does not pick up?

Hand-over means three different things, and each one needs a rule. Practice for all three.

• Rep to rep, when someone is away. A try should not wait behind an absent person. In MAJ Leads, if the assigned rep is away the call moves to the next available rep within about a minute, by round robin or your own rules, and a lead then keeps one owner so later calls return to the same person, as in who owns this lead.
• Rep to team, when nobody acts. A call left untouched for 10 minutes shows as up for grabs for the rest of the team, and the owner is alerted at 20 minutes. The rules are in up for grabs.
• Tries to a person, when the schedule ends. The lead stays on record with its full history. Write what happened on each try, so whoever picks it up later does not repeat a call. A reply from the lead reopens the schedule at the first try, and a callback the lead asks for is scheduled as its own try inside your working hours.

Before you hand a lead over, check that the next person can see the lead's history, the outcome of every try and the time of the last contact. If a schedule has stopped, decide whether a different channel the lead has already used is appropriate, and whether consent exists for it.

What does this mean for MAJ Leads?

MAJ Leads helps you follow up people who enquired, on a schedule that stops on a refusal, rolls to your next working slot and hands due calls to an available rep. It does not decide whether a given lead asked to be called, and it does not give legal advice. See working hours, Fridays and public holidays, how it works and pricing. We have no customer results on retries to report.