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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Hosted Telephony Was the Last Game Changer - What's Next for Contact Centres?

Imagine what a contact centre may look like in ten years time. In the technological world, a decade is a generation. If you can remember the year 2000, consider what technology was like then. Hosted telephony was still just a dream, as was SIP, and social media wasn't even a proper term. It's amazing, albeit a bit scary, how rapidly technology progresses, with less focus on direct interaction and even less focus on the human being. Bearing that in mind, here are some of the advancements that will no doubt shape the call centre of the future.

The largest continuing change is, without doubt, investment in VoIP, or Voiceover Internet Protocol. Businesses have generally been utilising VoIP for one reason - to lower costs - while neglecting to recognise its full potential. Research is showing that investment in VoIP and, to a lesser degree, workforce optimisation and CRM systems looks set to increase.

The great platitude, which does hold some meaning, is that customers are either a phone call or mouse click away from finding another service. Whether true or not, it must be assumed: successful interactions are imperative. Thus, the emphasis on customer service is more important than ever. Multi-channel technology will be a step up in customer choice, allowing them to choose text messaging or video, personalising the way one-to-one and web interactions are accommodated and handled.

Further down the line, then, the total virtualisation of call centres isn't so hard to imagine. In fact, it's inevitable. It will be just as easy for agents to work remotely - from home, a personal office, hub buildings, or even on the go. High speed connections to the web are getting faster, more reliable and more ubiquitous - therefore, there is less need for agents to work in offices, as a team. This will ultimately lower already inexpensive costs, as firms will no longer have to consider commercial property and equipment. This immediately raises the question of whether customers' enquiries will be handled properly and professionally - although interactions would typically be monitored by workflow and CRM systems.

Another vital change will be call routing, which we see on a small scale now, but will eventually allow customers to be quickly matched to the most appropriate agent. Voice recognition software will let centres deal more efficiently with customer and security checks, such as questioning. Already in effect is social customer service, which proves a hit with consumers. The concept is simple: customers interact online, in forums and such, answering each other's questions and solving one another's problems.

It may be a decade away, but as companies vie for new customers, optimised service and lower costs, the call centre will inevitably evolve. Hosted telephony was the last game changer, and it will continue to shape the industry, but who knows what's next. But with the focus on customer service and retention bigger than ever, one thing is for sure: the integration of new technology will make interactions easier and more personalised, offering a better service for clients and even better results for companies.

Steve Alexander has been writing about the future of the contact centre. For more information on hosted telephony, as well as SIP services, go to btlnet.co.uk

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