How to Keep Your Outbound Campaigns Compliant

Non-stop worries about OFCOM compliance, tighter restrictions on data and a continuous downward pressure on CPA all combine to make sure your job just keeps on getting harder.

The days of simple big-list outbound acquisition and customer cross-sell campaigns are well and truly over. Instead there’s a constant pressure for you to balance driving out performance with a requirement for ever tighter control over compliance.

Working to improve outbound performance and hit targets is hard enough. However you know that it’s compliance that really keeps outbound campaign managers up at night – particularly if your campaigns involve multiple outsourcers. Not surprisingly, you start to dread calls from the CEO’s office, particularly if something’s gone wrong and customers are already complaining to the Daily Mail!

With the ICO now able to fine organisations up to £500,000 for a breach, and OFCOM issuing seven-figure fines for persistent silent calls, compliance is a real concern – both from a business and personal perspective. If a serious data compliance breach happens on your watch – regardless of who was responsible – it’s not going to end well for you.

Prevention is always better than cure, so you need a form of compliance monitoring that will red flags possible risks. However, because you’re no doubt already working with multiple outsourcers, it needs to be agile enough to track all stages of your customer acquisition, cross sell and retention programmes.

So if you’re running multiple outsourcers I believe you really need some form of Central Agency Management (CAM) system in place to provide a mechanism for more accurate performance and compliance management. The best CAMs provide a common performance measurement standard that gives you insight into how all your engaged contact centres are actually performing. It will transform all dialler events from all outsourcers into a common format and provide drill down dashboard insight across all dimensions – agent/ agency/time of day/dialler activity/sales/and data sources.

In my recent roles working for leading Telco’s, I’ve used C-CAM from C-Centric to help the major organisations I’ve worked for gain better control over their major multi-outsourcer campaigns. With an increase use of offshore centres and CPA commercials you need a CAM to counter balance the slightly more detached relationship.  By tracking CAM performance at a dialler level you can make sure that all your activity complies with both Ofcom regulations and DMA best practice guidelines. You’ll also be able to monitor compliance on an outsourcer-by-outsourcer basis – without a CAM in place you’ll always have those nagging doubts.

Dialler data doesn’t lie, and with an optimised CAM solution place you get to benefit from features such as red flag silent call alerts, cross matching of all complaints against specific centres and agents, and early warning detection of rogue agent behaviour.

If you are managing the outbound channel, I strongly believe you should evaluate implementing a CAM solution for your company.

To learn more about protecting your outbound campaigns from compliance breaches, please download the new report that I’ve authored with C-Centric’s Michael Page that sets out how removing your compliance concerns is much easier than you think, and can be up and running within weeks.