Callmedia

Silent Calls Enforcement a Reality

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