Nuisance calls are becoming a real problem in the industry.
We’ve all been there: whether it is someone constantly ringing you about an accident you may have been in or some robotic voice advising you on PPI. Some businesses continue to break the law through their persistence.
As it stands, only the business entity is liable for any fines if they break the law, but recent proposals unveiled by the government have put directors in the firing line and could be issued with fines of up to £500,000. This has put a a huge pressure on businesses to get it right.
It’s a complex problem which affects many businesses across the UK today. There are, of course, some rogue companies that deliberately put in place nuisance calls but these are the minority. The majority of businesses want to follow best practice and ‘do the right thing’.
However, whilst they might have the right policies in place, sometimes these can fall down at execution level, where an agent may have forgotten to suppress or opt out an individual record. If this individual is called, it could be classed as a nuisance call and may result in a compliance breach.
To avoid this, businesses need to take ownership and make sure that processes are put in place and agents are given the right tools to succeed. It also needs to be driven from the top down to ensure adherence. But how can it best be achieved?
Putting processes in place
Businesses need to put stringent processes in place that are communicated effectively to their employees – and adhered to. It is not enough to carry out a one-off training programme or simply alert agents that new processes are in place. Ideally, businesses need to create a quality assurance or compliance department that monitors processes continuously, to ensure that procedures are followed and being met.
One aspect of this is to monitor call abandonment rates. If the rates peak above the compliance level, remedial action can be taken to bring them back to normal operating levels.
This is important because if regulators see that compliance has been breached in terms of the calls made, they want to see evidence that the control mechanisms have worked, remedial action was taken, and whatever damage occurred was mitigated or limited in scope as a result.
Involving the whole business
However, compliance shouldn’t begin and end in the contact centre. It needs to infiltrate right across the business so that anyone in contact with a customer knows what action to take if they breach regulations. GDPR is a prime example of this; in the past, organisations traditionally have not always recorded when and how they have obtained consent to email individuals. Businesses have had to sharpen their focus and ensure all their staff are trained and that processes and systems have been put in place to stay within the law.
Nuisance calls are a serious issue for any customer-facing organisation. Fierce competitiveness in the business world can lead call centre agents to put adverse pressure on the customer to buy. As a result, a customer may ask not to be called again. If the agent does not ‘tick the box’, the customer will remain in the cycle.
Quite often the quality assurance team will focus on the sales part of the call and not follow through to see if compliance has been met to remove the customer. Companies today, therefore, need to invest more in quality assurance to ensure that it also covers all of the call, from beginning to end, and that requests to be removed from the database or contact list are actioned by the agent.
Implementing the right technology
So how can technology be used to address this complex web of issues? A key first step is making sure there is one repository for all customer information. If information is held across disparate systems, it will be difficult to keep track when a customer has asked to be removed from your database.
It only takes one forgotten record to put you on the brink of breaching compliance. However, if the business is working with a single unified customer relationship management (CRM) solution, then there is just one tick box to address, and the business can have confidence that regulations have been met.
But it doesn’t just stop there. You also need to provide your agents with the right tools to do their job effectively. This is where predictive outbound dialling comes into play to help you achieve compliance. Phone numbers can be maintained directly within the dialler to prevent calls to contacts that do not wish to be called.
Also, if your CRM system passes through a blacklisted number to the dialler, no outbound call will be made and the phone number will be reported as blacklisted back to the CRM system.
Technology can also be used to help keep an audit trail of what has happened to an account. Within that audit trail, businesses need to record how they obtained consent, any retractions of that consent, and whether or not the customer has consented to be contacted once again in the future. There needs to be a full history recorded against this process, so the business has a legitimate defence if a challenge arises. However, with GDPR and the right to be forgotten it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Ultimately though, it is how technology is used rather than the technology itself which will help ensure compliance and bring about the elimination of nuisance calls within an organisation. It is the behaviour and attitude of the business and its staff which will determine whether a business is a perpetrator of nuisance calls or alternatively cuts them out altogether. This is what organisations need to reflect on as they consider the increasingly punitive punishments in place for those falling foul of the latest regulations.
Find out how the Enghouse Outbound Predictive Dialler, an outbound calling system that can quickly and easily detect busy signals, answer machines, and disconnected numbers can empower your agents through automated technology.