Are Rogue Call Centres Damaging the Industry?

A recent television expose highlighted the potential failings that call centres can slip into, if they do not keep up to date with the current rules and regulations

Recently BBC's Panorama did an excellent expose on the worst practices in the UK call centre market, practices which many businesses without the right processes and technology could quite easily find themselves falling into.

With the Information Commissioner's Office and OFCOM now able to impose fines of up to £2,000,000, can you afford not to be running a professional and compliant call centre?

The call center industry is heavily regulated, not from just one regulatory body, but several organisations, all of which telecommunication industries need to be aware of. So which regulations does your organisation need to comply with?

Telephone Preference Service

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) was formed due to the large volumes of unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls from call centres. TPS allows consumers to register their details to prevent sales calls to them, however over recent years, with the considerable expansion of the call centre industry, some organisations are choosing to ignore this regulation or are unaware of how to be fully compliant.

Panorama highlighted blatant disregard for the TPS regulations by showing a call centre contacting consumers multiple times a day despite them being TPS registered and continually asking to receive no further marketing phone calls.

OFCOM

OFCOM is considered the chief regulatory authority that all call centres need to comply with, and has recently been given additional powers to investigate and hand out substantial fines to companies who continues to ignore set regulations.

There are some key practices to ensure your organisation stays fully compliant:

Calling line identification must be presented on all outbound calls from call centres using automated calling systems, therefore allowing the consumers to access the telephone number of the organisation calling them.
Telephone numbers dialled and then abandoned should not be called again by that organisation's automated calling system for at least 72 hours, unless a dedicated operator is available to take the call.
Abandoned call rates must not exceed 3% of live calls for any 24-hour period for each campaign.
Any abandoned calls must carry a brief recorded information message which identifies the source of the call and offers the person called an opportunity to decline further calls from that source. The message must be played within two seconds of the telephone being answered.
Unanswered calls must ring for a minimum of 15 seconds.
Answer-machine detection must meet a highly defined criteria, with your false positive rate factored into your overall dropped call percentage.

PCI

PCI compliance is the most recent regulation that many call centres need to comply with, due to the ever increasing amount of fraud cases which are costing the banking industry millions of pounds per year.

The 16-digit credit card number can be worth a lot of money to unscrupulous people and extremely costly to your organisation if you have not taken the appropriate steps to prevent that data from falling into the wrong hands.

If you are collecting credit card details it is your responsibility to ensure you are collecting them in a PCI compliant way, which includes ensuring the information is not recorded as part of any call recording, through to storing the information securely and preventing unauthorised access to this data.

Regulation is good for the industry; however the regulatory and compliance landscape can be more complex than initially expected. Often the regulations do nothing more than promotes best practice and common sense.

To remain compliant businesses must embrace technology. From predictive dialler software with Ofcom compliant answer machine detection and PCI compliant call recorders, businesses need to know what regulations they must adhere to and what technology will support them.

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