PHILADEPHIA, PA - “The end game,” said Guy Caldwell, Business Development Manager for PossibleNOW, a national sponsor of the American Teleservices Association’s Compliance Series, “is to get to a position of safe harbor.” That one sentence, so succinct and yet with such complexity behind it truly summed up the teachings of the day.
On November 17, 2008, in the shadows of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and on hallowed grounds where Ben Franklin et al once gathered, the Mid Atlantic Chapter of the ATA held its annual Compliance Seminar for a pack house of over 50 attendees at the Independence Visitor’s Center in a richly historic section of Philadelphia.
In the spirit of Franklin’s Junto, which was a gathering of business leaders for “mutual improvement and knowledge” the ATA continued its mission of educating its members on the regulatory issues that face our industry.
“Today was extremely valuable,” said Jane Bulman, Executive Director, National Telemarketing for Comcast Corporation. “The amount of knowledge transferred and information shared with the attendees was enlightening and very essential.”
AND IT WAS FREE!
Mitchell Roth, a partner in the McLean, VA law firm of Williams Mullen and the lead counsel for the ATA conducted the seminar and provide and overview and real life examples of the currently regulatory environment.
“It’s very costly to be compliant,” said Roth, “But it is potentially exponentially more costly not to be compliant.” One example that he shared, which had the room’s attention as they all realized the financial impact, was a copy of a recently issued Civil Investigation Demand (CID) from the Federal Trade Commission. “I had never seen one of them,” said Jennifer Lyons, Compliance Director for 1 2 1 Direct Response, “Fortunately I have only heard of them, CIDs are a compliance officer’s nightmare.”
The response to this CID included 25,000 pages of documents and 500,000 pages of electronic documents. The CID was opened because the FTC had received 1,800 complaints against a firm that made 400,000,000 outbound calls over a two year period. After reviewing the 1,800 complaints Roth was able to eliminate 500 as duplicates, 300 as incorrect and eventually settled on 30 calls made in error.
“Forget the legal fees, forget the full-time position that was created to manage this communication,” said Roth. “Just the disruption of normal business activity has a tremendous negative financial impact to the business. Thirty calls out of 400,000,000.”
Mitch very methodically went through the details of this process and it was a true eye-opener for those who had not been exposed to the dealings with governmental agencies.
Other topics that were covered included the variance and contradiction in the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) laws and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) laws, shared responsibility between a vendor and an outsourced provider, regardless of indemnification language, safe harbor best practices, Do Not Call registries and the variances of federal and state laws (14 states have their own registry in addition to the national registry), pre-recorded messages, how subsidiaries are viewed and DNC exemptions based on established business relations and other qualifiers.
“This is complicated but very, very important stuff,” remarked Bryan Gray, Senior Vice President of Client Services for Telerx and President of the Mid Atlantic Chapter of the ATA. “It can make your head spin.”
Another hot topic that was discussed was the Self Regulatory Organization (SRO) that the ATA is developing. “We learned our lesson,” said Roth. “We see the potential legislation that is coming and we, as a trade association, want to get ahead of it.”
The purpose of the SRO will be to develop agreed upon guidelines for inbound calling and present them to the FTC and FCC. The ATA is developing an accreditation process for individuals who will be able to certify a call center based on the SRO guidelines.
If recognized by the government; all compliant filed by consumers will be forwarded to the SRO and would avoided the Civil Investigative Demand that makes compliance officers cringe. “It will serve as an enhancement of the image of our industry,” stated Roth.
Though nobody could say for sure how a new administration in January would affect these issues it was clear that federal regulators are currently looking at hold times, queue times, service to sales limitations and others as the next area where regulation will be focused on.
“That’s why the SRO makes so much sense,” stated Gray. “This should be fully supported by both internal and external call contact centers.”
Ben Franklin would have been proud. |
