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The The Neverending Story Of The Consequences Of Failing
To Self-Regulate

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions


 


Most fables start like this: "Once upon a time'" Being unwilling to break with tradition, I'll continue it. Once upon a time, there was a U.S. teleservices industry with little to no competition, few regulations and a lot of room to grow. Outbound, done well, was lucrative and the companies that were successful valued their customers and respected their limits. Enter the people who saw outbound as a "get rich quick" scheme, and outbound was branded with a scarlet "A"'for annoying.

"Perhaps we should talk about self-regulating," said the legitimate players, nervous that bad outbound habits would begin to scare away customers. "Nah," said many people in the industry. "That would put a kink in our business processes, and we're too busy for that."

As in most fables, the denouement is predictable. A lack of self-regulation led to an escalation of abuses by many outbound players, and the entire industry suddenly found that the Regulatory Fairy had flown in their windows overnight in the shape of the FCC and the FTC. Instead of a set of stern but practicable self-regulatory processes that they might have drafted on their own and been able to live with, what the industry got was a draconian rulebook with which many companies are still struggling to comply today.

Fast-forward a few years later, and many companies are still happily deceiving themselves. "Well, outbound may be regulated, but there's still inbound, Web media and self-service," they say. "No one will ever regulate those!" These companies haven't been paying attention. There are states with pending legislation requiring a caller who encounters an IVR to be able to zero out to an operator immediately, for example.

If your organization has been dragging its feet on implementing quality control and compliance systems in its call center, be assured that you're setting yourself up to be involuntarily put through the wash and dry cycle yet again.

As all fables have a moral at the end, let it be this'it's the companies that manage their processes for quality control and compliance because they want to, rather than because they have to, that get to run away with the beautiful princess and live happily ever after.

The author may be contacted at [email protected].



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