How do you approach consumer compliance in a call centre environment?

From 6 April, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will be granted new legal powers to tackle businesses head on who harass consumers with either nuisance calls or texts and will even be able to fine businesses up to £500,000. So what constitutes consumer compliance and how do you make sure your business is on the right side of the line?

There are serious consequences for those businesses deemed to be in breach of these powers. To date Ofcom has fined seven companies £1.6m for abandoned and silent calls, significantly impacting not only the bottom line but the effectiveness of customer engagement.

Here at Collstream we recognise that the impact for collections departments is significant, so we recommend the consideration of AMD functionality or Answer Machine Detection. This effectively means that in conjunction with pre-agreed parameters a call will be discarded if a response is deemed to be of a non-human origin, in partnership with CPA (Call Progression Analysis). This is technology that is initiated at the start of the call and intelligently decides whether a call is answered by a machine or a human based on the intonation of the respondents initial response.

The regulations often refer to Answer Machine Detection in the context of power diallers, but in fact we are positioned to deliver a much more sophisticated product. Our IVR capability enables you to create an automated initial decision as to whether a respondent on the other end of the line is human or machine and not only incorporates AMD functionality but added dynamic call progression analysis.

Our sophisticated Call Progression Analysis Technology (CPA) will effectively identify when a human voice is detected but, is related to an answer phone, not only that but the technology will allow our customers to replay the full answer phone message when this functionality is triggered so your customers are not left with half formed messages on answerphones as a more traditional dialler product might.