Telemarketing to your own customers now requires consent: what changed on 1 July

You know the scenario: a call centre phoning on behalf of your energy supplier, even though you never agreed to be called about anything. Since 1 July 2026, that is no longer allowed for most companies in the Netherlands. The Telecommunicatiewet, the Dutch telecoms act, was amended, and telemarketing now works fundamentally differently than it did for the previous ten years.

For customer service and sales teams that work by phone, this is not a legal footnote to leave to the lawyers. It directly affects how your call flows are set up, what sits in your CRM, and who you are still allowed to call with a new offer next week.

What changed on 1 July

Before the amendment, you could call anyone who was a customer, or had been one up to three years earlier. That exception is gone. Consumers and sole traders may now only be called with a commercial offer if they gave explicit prior consent. An active contract or a past purchase is no longer a free pass, not even for your own customers.

KPN found that out first. Following an investigation by the Dutch competition and consumer authority (ACM), it turned out the company was not complying well enough with the rules, and it changed its telemarketing practices before the deadline even passed. Two energy suppliers are going through a similar process. The regulator is currently focused on telecom and energy, the sectors with the most complaints, but the law applies to any business that calls consumers or small businesses with an offer.

What counts as consent, and what does not

The law sets four conditions: consent must be free, specific, informed, and unambiguous. That means an active action by the customer, such as ticking a box themselves. A pre-ticked box does not count, silence does not count, and an agreement buried somewhere in the small print of general terms does not count either.

A common mistake is asking for consent during a service call. If someone calls with a question about an outage or a delivery, you may gauge whether they are open to something new, but that call cannot double as the moment consent for future sales calls gets recorded. Consent has to stay tied to a clear, separate moment.

The burden of proof now sits with your business

Previously, a customer had to prove they never gave consent. That burden has been reversed. If the ACM asks why you called someone, you now have to show, per phone number, when consent was given, through which channel, and in which exact wording. A general note in the CRM saying 'this customer seemed open to contact' is not enough.

In practice, this means consent cannot sit loose in an inbox or on a separate form. It needs to be tied to the phone number itself, searchable, and retrievable within a reasonable time. For businesses running a calling system that is separate from their CRM, this is often the first moment it becomes clear the two do not line up well.

Outsourcing to a call centre does not protect you

Many businesses have telemarketing carried out by an external call centre or agency. The law gives no free pass for that. Under chain liability, the company commissioning the calls stays jointly responsible for compliance, even when the party making the calls is a hired third party. So check not only your own calling processes, but those of every party approaching customers on your behalf.

What is at stake

A violation can lead to a fine or a recurring penalty payment, with the ACM able to keep intervening as long as the practice has not changed. For organisations running an active calling programme, that adds up fast, especially at hundreds or thousands of calls a month.

Does this feel like a lot of process for a few phone calls? In practice, the bigger risk runs the other way. A customer who feels wrongly called now reports it faster than ever, to the ACM, in a review, or on social media. The legal fine is often smaller than the damage to the trust of the customers you did approach properly.

What is still allowed

Service calls remain unaffected: answering a question about an existing contract, reporting an outage, confirming a delivery date. Charities, lotteries that pay out to charity, and publishers of newspapers and magazines fall under an exception and may still call existing and former customers with an offer. The right to object still applies to them too: if someone asks not to be called again, that number must come off the calling list immediately.

What you can sort out this month

Four steps help put this in order. First, map out who you are still calling without recorded consent, including existing customers you call purely based on the customer relationship. Then set up a fixed field where you record, per phone number, the date, channel, and exact wording of the consent, ideally tied to your CRM or calling system so a staff member sees it before picking up the line.

Agree with every external call centre or agency how consent gets recorded and shared, and explain to your sales and customer service team exactly where the line sits between a service call and a sales call. That is where things most often go wrong in practice.

A phone system that sits apart from your CRM makes this kind of control hard. Zarioh helps organisations set up telephony and customer contact systems where consent per number is recorded and visible immediately to whoever picks up. Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation about your current setup.