BBC News has covered the recent Ofcom warning to four companies about their use of predictive diallers. These companies have been warned of their failure to comply with March's directive. This is in summary:
- No more than 3% of "live answered" calls can be dropped - that is, not connected through to a live operator.
- Any "dropped" call must be played a message informing them who is calling them and how they can opt-out of further communication (Debt collectors and certain other industries are however not obliged to accept your opt-out)
- Outbound calls must be made with Caller ID. This number must be valid and either be answered live or provide a recorded message as above (i.e. with opt-out rule)
- Calls must ring for a minimum of 15 seconds before being abandoned
- Calls must be connected through to a live operator within 2 seconds of the customer answering
These rules are not hard to abide by and Ofcom has given the industry several months to get it's act together before entering the enforcement stage. I welcome the action of Ofcom in sending a clear message to outbound call centres that they must play fair. The only thing that slightly disappoints me is they have chased the large corporate call centres which will of course find the investment and change.
You will probably find the named centres abused the rules but you'll probably find a lot of smaller call centres are much worse. I've heard of call centres that target their systems at 50% drop-rate, ring from a withheld number , then hammer the same customers again and again. These are the real culprits and Ofcom should be making clear messages to the smaller centres that they too must fall into line.
Footnote
I think it's interesting to note that 2 of the 4 companies warned use the same technology supplier, which also supplied 50% of the people warned last time. It is also probably interesting to note that supplier does not have anything like 50% of the market.