Keeping an Eye (and an Ear) On Legislation
posted by: Nick Roman on 5/6/2010
The news that UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has successfully lobbied for an increase in fines for companies who make silent calls to homeowners should ring a warning bell for research organizations conducting large-scale telephone interviewing.
With the potential to incur fines of up to £2 million for the misuse of electronic communications networks, researchers need to look carefully at the dialing software tools they employ.
Under Ofcom’s rules, if organizations rely on automated dialers to generate calls for their staff, they need to ensure that:
• Abandoned call rates must be no more than 3 per cent of all live calls made in any 24 hour period for each campaign.
• All abandoned calls must carry a short recorded information message identifying the source of the call.
• Calling line identification (CLI) must be included on all outbound calls generated by automated calling systems.
In all honesty, these requirements are the sort of thing that reputable MR businesses should be striving for anyway. It’s too easy for legitimate research efforts to get tarred with the same brush as dubious telesales activities, so it only makes sense to adhere to—even exceed—these rules.
But keeping a close eye on legislation and ensuring compliance is a major task for research organizations, particularly those that operate across different countries or regions. And, as consumer protection legislation is only likely to get tougher, it is something we all need to pay attention to.
While this is a UK example, continual updates to legislation are affecting research agencies at a global level—and, in turn, the software providers they rely on. As a result, compliance has become an important part of the procurement discussion, and cannot simply be a “nice to have” after price and basic functionality have been nailed down. Customers of MR agencies will expect their reputations to remain intact, and that you meet these requirements.
If you don’t, your competitors will. A £2 million fine, AND losing your customers is a double whammy that should focus even the most reluctant technophobe in procurement.