0800 652 4037
Tacking abandoned and silent calls
Ofcom
The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry
Get in touch now!
All of MX Digital's predictive dialler systems comply with Ofcom's latest dialling regulations below.
Summary Of Ofcom's Dialling Regulations
- The "abandoned call" rate shall be no more than three per cent of "live calls" on each individual campaign over any 24 hour period:
- All calls must ring for a minimum of 15 seconds before being recognised as "no answer"
- in the event of an "abandoned call", a very brief recorded information message is played within one second of the call being answered, which;
- identifies the company on whose behalf the call was made;
- identifies the intended purpose of the call (i.e. "an unsolicited sales call", "a call as part of debt recovery", etc)
- offers the called person the possibility of declining to receive further calls from that company by contacting a no charge (0800) or Special Services basic rate (0845) number;
- includes no marketing content and is not used as an opportunity to market to the called person;
- calls which are not answered should ring for a minimum of 15 seconds before being terminated;
- when an "abandoned call" is made to a particular number, that number is not called again in the following 72 hours, unless a dedicated operator is available;
- for each outbound call a CLI number is presented to which a return call may be made which is not charged at a higher rate than the national call rate;
- either a recorded message or a live operator is available at the CLI number presented to inform called persons of the identity of the organisation that called them, the intended purpose of the "abandoned call" and that the called person's number will be deleted from the organisation's database and added to its in-house suppression list at the called person's request if they leave their name and telephone number;
- any call made by the called person to the contact number provided shall not be used as an opportunity to market to that person;
- records are kept that demonstrate compliance with the above procedures
You want to read more about Ofcom's regulation
Answer Machine Detection
Whilst Ofcom has not specifically banned Answer Machine Detection (AMD) even the most accurate AMD will unfortunately generate some false positives and therefore abandon calls.
AMD is not infallible. Some answer machines will be recognised as a person and will be put through to an agent. These can be simply handled by an AMD button on the agent's screen.
Alternately a person may be recognised as an answer machine and as a result the call will be dropped. This would be seen by the called party as a silent call. The problem is that the dialler records the call as an answer machine and the call centre is none the wiser.
Ofcom has put considerable barriers in the way of operations using AMD technology. A contact classified as an answer machine may not be called back until the next day. Some operators have stopped using AMD and enable agents to classify connections to answer machines instead. In the old days this was not a viable option as agents were not trusted to classify correctly. However, with call recording this is less likely and in conjunction with reporting tools, can be easily monitored.