Safeguarding Your Contact Business

January, 2020

Compliance
Compliance with outbound contact regulation is a given, but it is often made more difficult by layer upon layer of legislation. To comply, you need a software-based rule-checking process.

The need in many countries for every customer engagement to comply with outbound contact regulation is a given; comply or face considerable penalties.

But it is often made more difficult by layer upon layer of legislation; for example, in certain territories:

  • you may only have one conversation, via any medium (voice, chat, SMS, email, etc) with a debtor in a given day, including if the debtor has called in
  • you may not contact a person more than five times in a week
  • you may not contact a person by any media more than once in 48 hours
  • if a voice call was abandoned, you may not try again for 72 hours
  • you may not call this number if it is on the company/ state/ country-wide Do Not Call (DNC) list

That’s no small challenge. To comply with potentially many levels of regulation, any contact engine, before initiating the next contact, must ask a software-based rule-checking process for an instant decision whether to make contact or not.

Any software designed to meet this challenge must have the following characteristics:

  1. flexibility – to tightly define any and all compliance rules, however complex, for any media channel and combine them in a single ruleset
  2. instant access to a customer’s contact history – to deliver precise contact history data across all media channels for a phone number, or a customer who may have several phone numbers or other contact addresses. This is essential for any ‘no customer contact for X hours’ rule, and any that refer to both inbound and outbound
  3. real-time processing – in the case of predictive dialing, to make decisions instantly, for potentially hundreds of dial requests per second, across all the rules for each request, so that predictive performance is not hampered
  4. failsafe – if the host, process or network fails, the system must block requests for contact until the service is re-established, in order to ensure compliance

Without these facilities, you risk failing to be compliant, and incurring penalties.

If you suspect that your contact software can’t cope with the complexities of compliance, just contact us.