The government has announced new rules governing the use of valid phone numbers by call centres when contacting people. Sounds great I hear you say, well it would be except most of what has been announced was implemented back when I was running diallers for call centres years ago.
The new regulations will have to grapple with the problem that many cold-calling firms are based overseas. Most also use internet phone lines, potentially making it easier to mask their origin.
Mr Vaizey will also set up a taskforce with members of the industry, regulators and watchdogs to address the blight of cold-calling. The new rules will apply only to cold-calling firms and similar companies, and not to members of the public or others who wish to withhold their phone number.
One of the biggest problems with the call centre industry is silent calling and a large part of that problem is down to answerphone detection. There is a simple method that can be implemented that will drastically reduce this as an issue given that the majority of people who need it use the virtual voicemail service provided by their service provider. Add a specific beep code to the start of the message that will tell a dialler it is an answerphone and to end the call and then make it an industry standard. While it won't help people with physical answering machines it will cut down the problem by 80-90% and would be a hell of a lot more effective than the manual 'calculate false positive answerphone detection' bollocks which was developed using pure guesswork on the basis that all diallers use the same detection algorithm with the same settings, something which is never going to happen.
Separately, the Ministry of Justice is also considering making directors personally responsible for the calls made by their firms. This could open up new legal routes for victims to claim compensation.
So it isn't all bad then, OFCOM already has something like this in place and it absolutely terrified me back in the day as both the company and the dialler manager could be hammered for excessive cold calling and 'abuse of technology' with massive fines and prison sentences. Given past experience of sales driven senior managers speeding up the diallers without consulting me which meant that we would end up with silent calls well above the regulatory limit, going after the directors as well can only be a good thing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3189841/Cold-caller-face-ban-using-unknown-phone-number-ruse-Spam-marketing-firms-forced-display-number-new-rules.html
