What can you buy for 2 million quid?

Silent calls are back in the news with what used to be the DTI (morphing through BERR to it's current name "The Department of Business, Inovation and Skills" - come back Prince, all is forgiven...) publishing plans to increase the maximum level of fines from the current £50k to a maximum of 2 million pounds. (Click here for press release).

If you can cast your mind back to last year's action against Barclaycard, Ofcom's chief Ed Richards said at the time "Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse". Well, it looks like he may get it.

The plans to consult on the level of fines were set out in the controversial "Digital Britain" report published last June where I for one completely failed to notice the text in paragraph 50 on page 200 saying:

"A further growing area of concern for the Government is the disparity between the various penalties that Ofcom can impose under the Communications Act 2003 in relation to actions causing consumer harm. For example, where Ofcom has found breaches of the Broadcasting Code regarding phone-in scandals and the consumer harm they caused, it has been able to impose fines of well over £1m. Conversely, where Ofcom has found serious breaches of its rules on persistent misuse of a network or service, in particular in relation to extremely high numbers of silent calls (where the people receiving the calls had no method of knowing who had made them, with the resulting consumer harm), the statutory ceiling as currently set only allows Ofcom to fine up to £50,000. It seems to the Government that the discrepancy between these levels of fine is no longer sustainable or desirable. The Government will therefore consult on the penalties that Ofcom is able to impose for contraventions of the Communications Act 2003 and, in particular, the level of the fine it can impose in relation to persistent misuse cases."

(Download full report here (PDF))

So what does this mean?

It has long been argued that the level of the fine has not been the deterrent so much as the reputational damage to your brand. That's why Ofcom have always made it clear they'll go after the originating brand, rather than any outsourced contact centre that happens to actually make the calls. Loosing a bank only £50k in the last year would probably not have registed on the level of petty cash, given what's been going on, but £2m is enough to make even the most profilgate of spenders stop and think.

So, if the threat of 2 million quid fine is enough to sharpen most organisations' focus on managing their dialler properly, what will and what should happen? Well for my tuppenceworth:

(1) Answer Machine Detection (AMD) - we need to get heads out of sand on this one. AMD causes silent calls (fact). Silent calls cause nuisance and anxiety (fact). I'm sorry, but I don't understand why this is still being debated.

(2) Some further clarification on calculating silent call rates when AMD is and isn't being used would be helpful. The DMA has put together some excellent work on this (which I've been a part) and it would be helpful to have that endorsed.

(3) Everybody with an interest in this field should respond to the consultation. My response will be that I will welcome the increased level of fines but call for the publication of the AMD research carried out by Ofcom earlier in the year, and ask that Ofcom confirm publically and in print those clarifications on the silent calls calculations that they've made in public meetings organised by the TPS and others.

Meanwhile I'm wondering, what would I do with £2,000,000?

The Micro Men and the Connected Kids

My past and my present collided in a happily nostalgic way his week. Firstly, I watched “Micro Men” on the telly. It was the tale of the rivalry between the two Cambridge-based home-computer giants of the early 1980s - Acorn and Sinclair. Geeks back then (of whom I was one) tended to wear their allegiances to each of those brands on their selves and I was an out-and-out Acorn man. Indeed, my first gig in the computing world was with a company that sold networking software and hard discs for the BBC Micro - the entire network operating system had to fit into less memory than the average logo on a website does now...

The real reminder was just how new computers were back then. When I first arrived at my secondary school, it owned one computer (an RML 380Z in case you care). You could book 15 minute sessions on it and write programs in a variety of languages, but frankly only a small number of us bothered. The computer lab didn’t appear until I was doing my o-levels and when I left there was still no such thing as computer studies - computers were only used to support teaching in maths and some science classes.

Fast-forward 25 years and I was at parent’s evening for my 4 year old. She’s been 4 for 3 months, and at school for 4 weeks. It is an ordinary village school (not some kind of NASA-sponsored academy) and I was told how she enjoyed ICT (that’s computers for the uninitiated). ICT! She’s 4! I was changing her nappies less than 20 months ago - now she’s being tought how to use Windows!

When she leaves school she’ll be computer literate in systems that now have not even been imagined. She will be familiar with, and probably own, devices that are networked she will communicate and collaborate with her friends and peers in ways that will probably have me harumphing about like a Luddite, bemoaning this “new-fangled technology”. Douglas Adams has a great quote about technology which I wholeheartedly endorse....

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

• Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
• Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it.
• Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

So what’s this got to do with the price of fish? Well, another timely collision into my week was reading in Saturday’s Guardian about the amount of time teenagers and young adults spend on social networking sites (stuff that will seem as dated as the ZX81 to my younger daughter when she’s 18). The generation emerging from education into the workplace thinks, communicates, collaborates in ways their forebears simply don’t. They’re emerging into a world in which economic uncertainty will encourage greater scrutiny of their purchases and brand loyalties than their parents (at least I bleedin’ hope so - otherwise, we will have learned nothing from the last 18 months). Being so at home in their connected world, they will be expecting to use the same tools to communicate with retailers and service providers and local authorities and educators as they do with their peers. That was the point of a paper I gave, together with Peter Carragher of the essentiagroup, at the CCF conference last month. We looked at the internet and communication usage of different age groups and discussed how this needs to impact the way we run customer contact in the very near future. It was good fun to research and put together, & I’d like to hear what others thing. If you’d like a copy of the material, drop me an email via contact@callmedia.co.uk or post a comment on this blog entry.

Although terrifyingly old fogyish and rather unfashionably the wrong side of Douglas Adam’s quote, the geek in me is fascinated by what will come next in the world of communication. Just as long as I’m not expected to use it....