Industry should take a stand against increasing numbers of rogue callers

Complaints to Ofcom about unwanted marketing calls have trebled to almost 10,000 a month since the beginning of the year with ‘silent’ calls increasing from 1,000 to 3,000 complaints a month, with the body pointing the finger at PPI and accident claim firms using ‘aggressive marketing practices’ as the culprits.

Tony Hesketh, Aspect’s Director of Solutions Consulting, said that, in fact, increasing numbers of organisations are taking simple steps to comply with regulations, but the 80/20 rule applies to a small group of companies determined to favour quick sales over the customer.

“The old adage – 80 per cent of the complaints derive from 20 per cent of contact centres – definitely rings true here, and the industry should take a stand against these companies,” Hesketh said. “On a granular level, the increase in abandoned, silent and unwanted calls can be more accurately blamed on both the misuse of technology originally designed to prevent them and pressure on contact centre managers.”

He stated: “The fact of the matter is, organisations are not focused on the customer experience and are putting incredible pressure on contact centre managers to use outbound dialling technology incorrectly. Contact centre managers are under a heap of pressure, including managing several different technologies at once, running a busy telesales or customer service department and administrating a wealth of reporting. In the wrong hands, this technology, such as automatic diallers and answering machine detection, can be a menace and not eliminate bad outbound practices.”

“The Ofcom regulations are necessary to both ensure consistency in the market and combat opportunistic and irresponsible companies that are giving the outbound industry a bad name. The challenge is to maintain compliance with the regulations and ensure agent and contact centre productivity,” he said.

But there is some hope, as recent joint research from Aspect and the Contact Centre Association (CCA) recently indicated that Ofcom regulation changes in 2010 have largely achieved compliance amongst outbound operators (both specialist outsourced companies and in-house teams) at little cost.

Hesketh commented: “Some forward-thinking operators are not only ensuring they comply, but are taking radical steps in refining operations to make up for potentially reduced productivity due to stricter regulations. These steps involve using alternative channels such as email, IM, and social media for outbound contact which should drive inbound calls, and focusing on improved targeting by filtering data before calls are made, to increase the success rate.”