Just a Paging bug jumper post

DaveA

Afternoon,

Although I'm an great fan of these forums its only now (about 6 months after discovering the place) that I write my first post.

I work for a large collections company in the UK, my official job title is *deep breath* "Capacity Planning and Workflow Co-Ordinator". I'm basically in charge of the call centre forecasting and scheduling as well as looking after our dialler. I also get 'bonus points' for increasing the number of inbound contacts we receive.

My colleague has been doing some research into alternate avenues of communication (rather than phone and letter) to tempt our debtors to get in touch. I believe it's currently illegal (or at the least contravenes UK regulations) to leave automated messages on debtors’ answering machines.

After reading this topic I sent an SMS to our landline number and yes the message was translated to a voice message. This got me thinking that we could simply send out a batch of a few thousand sms to landline numbers and compare the results to a similar cross section of accounts with mobile numbers.

Does anybody know if this would be contravening any UK regulations in leaving messages in this way and does anybody have any experience in this grey area?

Many thanks,
Steve

I believe it's currently illegal (or at the least contravenes UK regulations) to leave automated messages on debtors’ answering machines.

It's only illegal if the call is for marketing purposes. If you're debt collecting, then this wouldn't apply.

However, I would've thought there may be data protection or privacy issues with leaving answer machine messages - it may be that one of your debtors lives in a shared house and wouldn't like his co-habitants to know of his financial situation. However, if the message that you're leaving is just "Hi, this is Steve from Williams & co, please give me a call on 0208.." etc, then I wouldn't see that being a problem.

Regards,
Darryl

I concur as far as I am aware "Hi, this is Steve from Williams & co, please give me a call on 0208.." is acceptable under the Data Protection Act - no data has been disclosed.

However I would suggest you need to look at The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 which covers the use of automated messages (paragraph 19). I think you need legal guidance as a result.

I have discussed this particular issue with a well known financial company who wanted to use a dialer to either contact people on outbound for collections or leave a message saying please contact me on this number.

They looked into the legalities of this and found that it is perfectly legal to contact a customer and leave a message as long as the data protection act is not broken.

So the scenario of

"Hi, this is Steve from Williams & co, please give me a call on 0208.." would be fine.

It is however illegal to leave unsolicited marketing voicemails for people.

Hi this is Yellow Insurance we can beat your current insurance company, please call us on 0208 to discuss further.

Hope this helps
Jason

Productivity wise a dialer with good answer phone detection rates can be programmed to either transfer the call to an agent or leave the automated message.

Steve this can improve the inbound productivity of a collections call centre massively so when you say

"I also get 'bonus points' for increasing the number of inbound contacts we receive"

You should maybe considering converting some of those bonus points to pounds and giving me a call.

Jason

Hi,

I agree with the comments from Jason and Darryl - certainly you will probably need to sign a legal disclaimer from your dialler supplier as they are often nervous at allowing their technology to be utilised in this way. Ultimately I expect they dont want any complaints being directed back at them "allowing" the feature. So this is where you need to properly manage the operation and use your experience and skills to keep within the guidelines.

Again, SMS's should be legally verified so that you are sending the correct content to your customers and response rates monitored to get the best out of the service.

Certainly these functions are not new ideas nor untried and they are successfully in place in my own and similar environments.

Good management of these technologies in the relevant environment will help to smooth the path for other companies that wish to use them in future.

Gary.

Thanks for replying guys...

Jason-
We currently filter out most of the answer machines and treat these like a 'busy'. We apply recycle rules to these result codes and attempt the number an hour later, up to a maximum of 5 times in a day. This is attempting to get the live contact to the agents. For some reason when we are having a quiet day and decide to turn the detection 'off' the return rate is extremely low (sometimes less than 0.5%).

Our dialler has the automated message feature installed and ready for use - the only issue being that the board are quite nervous about us leaving thousands each day and possibly breaching OFT guidelines. Even though we're not a marketing company and are not covered by the DMA, TPS etc - the board fear the effects that any bad publicity would have on our call centre would quite literally kill us...


Gary-
We have had quotes from companies offering SMS to mobile services claiming a hit rate of 10% for collections - this seems very high - from your experiance is this an accurate figure? We are about to have a trial with a couple of companies and I was wondering if there's anything we have to be wary about?

Steve

Recorded messages - your permission is needed!

If you are receiving unsolicited sales and marketing voice recorded messages down your telephone line, and you have not given prior consent to receive such messages, you can ask the marketer to stop sending these.

They are legally obliged to act upon your request. If you are still receiving such calls you can complain either to us or the Information Commissioners Office.

Their details appear on the Useful Links page.


http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/news1.html

I think what we are trying to determine here is whether or not his messages would be considered "sales or marketting".

Justin apologies, I don't have time to read the whole post string but I try to be helpful where possible.

There was a discussion on leaving messages on voicemails. Questions were raised about the legality of this.

I stumbled upon this message this afternoon which I thought was relevant to the discussion.

What the TPS message says is that you can request not to receive these calls.

Which maybe answers a few questions about whether or not its legal to leave messages in the first place.

I am surprised and a little unsure about this but it sounds as if its legal to leave messages but illegal to fail to remove people from your marketing list if requested.

Jason

SMS didnt add value for me.

I asked Virgin credit card categorically to not contact me by phone (having been subject to outbound fraud - yeah they all do it, outbound calls from credit cards companies should be banned). Anyway the agent assured me I'd receive no phone contact from Virgin. I was immovable on this point.

What do I get today?

Text message on my mobile: Your Virgin credit card has been accepted please sign the form which will be with you shortly.

Grrr. I dont want to be contacted and secondly the content of the message is redundant - I cant act on it even if I wanted to. Its like sending someone a text saying "Thursday will be in 3 days time."

SMS no thanks, just another excuse for duplication and disturbing me when I dont want to be disturbed.

So are you suggesting that we shouldn't use SMS at all?

Nah, I'm not making any suggestion or inference except to say it didnt and doesnt work for me. If I dont want to be contacted by phone I mean aurally and visually.

On a side note I have also noticed an increase in speculative and junk SMS's from those companies that have my mobile number.