In the U.K., it’s five percent. In the U.S, it’s three percent. It’s one of the most critical rules of telemarketing. What is it? It’s the percentage of calls that can be “abandoned” by telemarketers. If a company exceeds these rates, they could be subject to fines.
An abandoned call is defined as an outbound call placed by a dialer for which there is no agent available when the customer picks up. From the customer’s perspective, it’s the annoyance of having the telephone ring and picking it up to find only silence at the end. Some in the industry call them “silent calls.” They are often considered to be a natural side effect of using automated dialing equipment, and they often occur when the dialer is placing outbound calls faster than agents become available to talk.
Strictly speaking, in the U.S., the number of permissible abandoned calls is zero, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC (News - Alert)) legislation that governs this, the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), has some wiggle room. It dictates that a telemarketer will not face enforcement action over abandoned calls if the organization uses technology that ensures abandonment of no more than three percent of all calls answered by a live person, measured over the duration of a single calling campaign, if less than 30 days, or separately over each successive 30-day period or portion thereof that the campaign continues. In addition, if there is no agent to take the call, the company can choose to play a recorded message informing the customer who was calling and what the purpose of the call was. In the U.K., abandoned call regulations are maintained by independent regulator and competition authority Ofcom, and those violating the five percent rule or other regulations risk a £750,000 fine.
It’s one of the most critical rules to understand (whether you’re doing business in the U.S. or the U.K.), but a new study suggests that too many marketers are unaware of the rules and the consequences of breaking them. A recent study by contact center solutions provider Aspect (News - Alert) found that in the UK, only 28 percent of customer service professionals who responded claim to perform a thorough review of regulation compliance, including call abandonment, at least once each quarter, since telemarketing rules change frequently.
“A contact center is like a motor engine that has a basic, older structure that has had parts replaced, added on, polished, shined and improved. It’s important to take a look at the contact center regularly, to ensure optimal performance, and to prevent the public fallout that can occur when legacy systems inevitably backfire,” said Dave Ogden, Ofcom regulations expert and account executive at Aspect. "But contact centers are slightly more likely to audit their compliance annually – 54 percent – than their technology, with 52 percent. This means that almost half of U.K. contact centers take a full review less than once a year, but Ofcom rules can change more frequently," he added.
Alarmingly, 15 percent of U.K.-based respondents to the study did not even know whether they needed to be compliant with industry regulatory bodies other than Ofcom. The study found that most companies perform their own regulatory audits, with only six percent using an outside authority for the audit. Ogden recommends that companies not only perform audits quarterly, but also evaluate hardware and software for compliance, and share the best practices of other contact centers.
Edited by Blaise McNamee