Callmedia News (full text)

Callmedia Announces 2008 User Forum Dates

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia is pleased to announce that the second annual Callmedia User Forum will be held in conjunection with the Call Centre Expo and CCF Conference at the National Exhibition Centre on the 16th & 17th September in Birmingham, England.

Director of Product Marketing, David Groves, said " Last year's inaugural event was a great success - we had so much positive feedback from delegates that we've again decided to co-locate with the CC Expo and Conference. We are just putting the final details for the forum programme together for publication in July. Needless to say we have a lot of great content and look forward to seeing as many of our users as possible a what promisses to be an exciting and very useful event."

To reserve your booking for this event, which is free to Callmedia users and customers, email sales@callmedia.co.uk. Full details will be published by mid July.

Callmedia at DMA Open Meeting

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia's Rufus Grig will be among the speakers at a forthcoming open meeting of the UK's Direct Marketing Association (DMA) on the future of telemarketing. Among the other speakers are fellow DMA Contact Centre Council members and representatives from PhonePayPlus (the new name for ICSTIS, the premium rate regulator) and the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

The event takes place at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London's West End on Tuesday April 1st.

The meeting looks at the future of telemarketing, the future of inbound non-geographic telephone numbers, and mis-selling and compliance in the financial services sector.

Rufus will be speaking as part of the launch of the DMA's Telemarketing Manifesto, which aims to promote the future of telemarketing and to secure its long-term future.

Follow the link to the right to book for this free event, or to view the manifesto.

Callmedia responds to Ofcom consultation

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This month Ofcom closed its latest consultation on the use of predictive diallers in the UK. As had been predicted by Callmedia, the consultation focussed heavily on the use of Answer Machine Detection and its impact on predictive diallers.

Callmedia’s response was in line with its ground-breaking white paper of 2006, Secret Silent Calls, arguing that the use of AMD is bad practice in a predictive dialler because it generates silent calls. Silent calls from a mis-classified answer machine, which cause nuisance and anxiety to consumers. Turning off AMD also benefits call centre operators because:

• Agents hear the first “hello” from the consumer, enabling them to build rapport, and making a successful outcome more likely
• Connected calls are no longer discarded in error by Answer Machine Detection technology, increasing your connect rate, productivity and profitability
• Your brand reputation is protected against the poor consumer experience of an silent call
• You are not wasting your abandoned call quota of 3 in 100 live connections on falsely detected answering machines, increasing productivity and profitability.

Ofcom’s consultation period closed on 1st February and a revised set of rules on predictive diallers is expected in the next couple of months.

Call centres using a predictive dialler need to take extra care if they are using Answer Machine Detection to ensure that they don’t find themselves foul of the Ofcom rules. Any dialler user, of whatever make, can contact Callmedia for advice on implementing an Answer Machine Detection strategy.

For more information, see Ofcom’s consultation and Callmedia’s response. Callmedia’s full recommendations on the use of answer machine detection are in the Secret silent calls white paper.

Callmedia at the CCA Convention

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia will be appearing at the Annual CCA Customer Contact Convention in Edinburgh this November. Taking place at the EICC on the 6th & 7th November, the convention is a gathering of almost 900 of the contact centre world's senior professionals, and Callmedia will be taking the opportunity to launch a new white paper - "Integration, Integration, Integration".

The white paper calls for increased integration in three aspects of the contact centre:
• Integration of the contact centre within the organisation
• Integration across channels
• Integration of systems and processes from the contact centre through to the back office and fulfilment
Although manifestly different issues, the three are key to offering a consistent and quality service to consumers and will deliver significant competitive advantage when successfully implemented.

The paper will be available free to anbody who registeres with Callmedia on stand C24.

Callmedia First User Forum a Success

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia hosted its inaugural User Forum at Call Centre Expo 2007 on 26^th to 27^th September 2007, at the NEC, Birmingham.

During the two day exhibition, attendees visited the Callmedia User Forum and took part in discussions and workshops about the challenges facing contact centres today, how contact centres can help manage changes in regulation and compliance and how to make best use of customer data, as well as how to integrate contact centre and business data to measure the Key Performance Indicators that matter.

One customer said "It was a great opportunity to meet Callmedia staff...also excellent networking with other Callmedia customers". Another commented that the event generated "lots of useful thoughts for future development".

The materials presented are now available for download.

Rufus Grig to Present at Contact Centres World Africa Conference

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia's Managing Director, Rufus Grig, will be presenting a paper this month at the Contact Centres World Africa 2007 conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the future of outbound contact centres.

Rufus will be sharing with the conference th experience of the UK and US markets in dealing with regulation, and promoting a positive approach to good quality outbound calling.

For more information on the conference, follow the attached link.

The Conference Paper slides and white paper will be made available on this website after the event.

Callmedia Calls for an End to Answer Machine Detection

Fri, 18 May 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Callmedia, the UK based provider of contact centre systems and specialists in responsible dialling, have published a white paper calling for an end to the practice of automatic detection of answering machines in order to improve the quality of outbound calls and to help the industry stay within the Ofcom dialling rules and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s Code of Practice.
Launching the White Paper, "Secret Silent Calls", Callmedia's Managing Director, Rufus Grig, said "While we at Callmedia have always recommended that answer machine detection not be used, this is white paper is a substantive exploration of the arguments and call for action to stop this practice. In addition to calling on the industry to abandon this practice, which generates unnecessary silent calls causing distress to consumers, we also call upon Ofcom to give this matter urgent consideration as the regulator reviews its rules on predictive dialling."

The white paper, available for download by clicking on the link on the right of this page, is aimed at regulators, clients, contact centre operators and anybody interested in responsible outbound dialling and the state of the industry.

Callmedia is a UK leader in contact centre technology and an industry leader in responsible dialling.

Callmedia Strengthens Channel Offering with New Sales Director

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 GMT

Fareham, UK, 23^rd March 2007 – Callmedia, the UK’s leading developer of contact centre software, today announced the appointment of Shane Wallis as sales director. Bringing over 12 years channel sales experience in the industry, Wallis will be responsible for recruiting and maintaining relationships with Callmedia channel partners including IP integration, G3, Civica, Redstone and Azzurri. As sales director, Wallis will play a crucial part in the growth of Callmedia.

Wallis comments: “Callmedia’s partner network contains a great set of resellers with an impressive pipeline. I am thrilled to be joining the team and look forward to working with our partners to grow our already healthy market share. I see my main objective as growing Callmedia into the partner of choice for all integrators serious about contact centres.”

Prior to joining Callmedia, Wallis was responsible for growing and developing VoIP vendor Zultys’ UK channel and also ran distributor Azlan’s growing Cisco Division. Wallis’ experience of running his own company will also play a key role in developing relationships within the channel.

Rufus Grig, managing director, Callmedia comments: “Shane has the leadership and enthusiasm required to take advantage of Callmedia’s established position in the industry. Shane will bring a lot to the team and will play a key role in the company moving forward.”

Wallis’ appointment coincides with Callmedia’s move to new, state-of-the art office premises, brought about by Callmedia’s continued growth and success.

Silent Calls Enforcement a Reality

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The issuing of fines to four businesses in January 2007 by Ofcom, the UK telecommunications and broadcast regulator, has ended any doubt that Ofcom is serious about acting over silent calls. In a process that has lasted more than 18 months, after much lobbying my many organisations and individuals, including Callmedia, Ofcom has fined companies fines ranging from £30,000 to £45,000 for generating abandoned calls using predictive dialling equipment between April and July of last year (2006).

In March 2006, Ofcom published a set of rules governing how firms should operate predictive diallers if they wanted to avoid being fined for “persistent misuse” of the network, under the terms of the Communications Act of 2003. The rules are summarised as:

(1) If a predictive dialler has to abandon a call because there is no agent available, the dialler should play a brief recorded message stating the name of the business and a telephone number the call recipient can ring. This must be done within 2 seconds of the call being answered;

(2) These abandoned calls should not exceed 3% of all the live calls made within a 24 hour period;

(3) All calls should ring for a minimum of 15 seconds before being disconnected and classified as “no answer”;

(4) All calls must present a Calling Line ID (CLI) to which a return call can be made.

The companies that were fined by Ofcom were all guilty of violating at least one of these rules, some had violations in many categories. What’s more, although most of the publicity surrounding the new rules has centred on the requirement to play an “information” message in the event of an abandoned call, one of the companies fined was found to have played an information message in 100% of cases and the fine issued (£32,500) related to generating excessive numbers of abandoned calls and not allowing calls to ring for 15 seconds before being abandoned.

Companies operating predictive dialling equipment should take this news as warning to check their compliance with every aspect of the code- not just those aspects that grabbed the headlines.

Any business operating an outbound contact centre who concerned about compliance should contact the experts, Callmedia, on 0800 316 2222 or via the website http://www.callmedia.co.uk.

Existing Callmedia users must ensure that they are running at least 4.0 of Callmedia had have enabled information messaging and outbound CLI. Any users unsure about any aspect of compliance should contact Callmedia directly either by telephone on 0800 316 2222 or via the support centre at support@callmedia.co.uk