business telemarketing
Can an employee represent themselves as another company as long as a contractual obligation needs to be met
<p>I am wondering if an employee of a company can represent themselves on the telephones as long as another company legally allows that employee to do so.  </p>

<p>For example, Company A &ndash; a small delivery company &ndash; writes a contract which requests the services of Company B &ndash; a sales company &ndash; to do sales and dispatching for the delivery company.</p>

<p>Now Bob, who gets paid by and is employed by Company B, would need to call the delivery drivers or new potential clients and say "Hi this is Bob from Company A...".  Under normal circumstances, this is fraud, but since there is a contract in place asking for the sales company to provide a service, if it would allow their employees to provide a service, in theory, there would be an alternate solution.</p>

<p>Can this representation on the telephones, and with clients or any other entity lead to legal problems as long as there are contracts in place allowing such an action?</p>

<p><strong>I am not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. Etc.</strong></p>

<p>An online definition  of "from": Used to indicate a source, cause, agent, or instrument.</p>

<p>Bob is an employee of B, but is acting as an agent of A. An agent is legal "One who agrees and is authorized to act on behalf of another, a principal, to legally bind an individual in particular business transactions with third parties". If Bob makes a sale of services to Customer C, said sale is binding on B, not A, in the same way that if Bob were part of B's (nonexistent) in-house sales department, rather than an exterior company.</p>

<p>As Bob is an agent of A, on whose behalf he is calling, he can refer to himself as "from A" when acting in that capacity.</p>

<p>(All definitions from thefreedictionary.com, which has a legal dictionary section)</p>

<p>If Bob is employed by B and B is contracted by A, it doesn't mean that there is a valid agency agreement between Bob and A, not even an implied agency agreement.</p>

<p>If Bob nevertheless decides to continue to claim that he is calling on behalf of A (only to the point of executing the contractual obligations of B which B has delegated to him), as long as he doesn't induce the clients to act in a way that would result in a (financial) injury/damage, his false claim wouldn't be considered as fraud. However, it would be viewed as misrepresentation. If the clients end up with monetary damages then it would be a fraudulent misrepresentation. </p>

<p>The only solution would be to create an addendum to the contract between A and B which can be easily done in 5 minutes to specify what Bob can and cannot do. 
When unsure, always steer on the safe side and do it in writing.</p>

<p>I'm not a lawyer though, I just relied on a basic Google search.</p>
