Dodo stung hard for DNCR Act breaches
This week’s record fine for breaches of the Do Not Call Register Act does more than sting national ISP Dodo, the unhappy record holder.
It ends an information drought for Australian businesses that use contract call centres for telemarketing.
As a regular contributor to the coffers of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Dodo is no stranger to regulatory imposts. But the speed at which big Do Not Call fines can accumulate should alarm even the most blasé operator.
Just 67 non-compliant telesales calls translated into a $147,400 penalty.
You read it right: 67 calls = $147,400
According to a written undertaking the company has provided to regulator Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), ACMA’s investigation turned up 67 calls in a three month period to homes that should have been immune thanks to their registration on the national Do Not Call list. Those calls have translated into a penalty of $147,400.
Call it a cost of $2,200 per call or annualise it at around $600,000 a year. Any way you look at it, it’s a scary number especially for a first offence. Just imagine the hole that 670 or 6,700 unlawful calls would punch in a bottom line.
ACMA comes out of the closet
Even more interesting than ACMA’s hard line with Dodo is that the regulator has finally come out of the closet on some of its opinions about how to comply with the Do Not Call Register Act. For some time now, the authority has been developing private views about what a business needs to do when it engages a contract call centre for a sales campaign. Until now, it hasn’t gotten around to letting business into the secret.
CSPs responsible for the sins of their outsourced telemarketers
Basically, the Do Not Call Register Act says that if a contract call centre breaches the Act, the customer who engaged it is also liable unless it used reasonable efforts to prevent the breach. The Act is worse than silent as to what might constitute due diligence. It mandates a puny clause that must appear in any outsourced telesales contract. Many enterprises have understood the inclusion of the clause to be all that’s required.
ACMA sets the bar high
Even if the standard clause is only a starting point, it gives no hint of the lengths that ACMA privately considers are required. Neither does the authority’s web site, or the Do Not Call Register site it auspices. Nor, as far as we know, has any public utterance of the regulator until Dodo’s written undertaking appeared online with a media release.
Undertakings are extracted by regulators like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and ACMA as substitutes for court orders. Although they often set higher standards than a business might adopt if it hadn’t already been caught out legally, they still shed valuable light on what the regulator reckons proper practice to be.
How does your telemarketing contract measure up ?
So if you have a contract telemarketing arrangement in place, see how you stack up against the following benchmarks gleaned from the Dodo document.
Does your contractor provide regular reports of all numbers called and which of their staff made each call ? Do the records include whether each call was answered and its duration ? Are these records retained for at least a year ?
Do you know which phone companies carry your contractor’s calls ? Is there a system for recording that information for at least a year afterwards ?
Are all call centre staff trained in compliance with the Act ? Are there systems to ensure caller identification is turned on at all times ? If someone calls back the displayed number, will they easily reach a representative of your organisation ? Absent these kinds or processes, ACMA is likely to sheet home blame for any call centre misconduct to you.
But wait, there may be more …
Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that ACMA’s expectations are exhausted by the Dodo documents. We have heard suggestions that clients of call centres should audit called number records against the official register, a tricky assignment since the register will have changed since the calls were made.
Come on ACMA, share the secret
In time court rulings will clarify what’s required but like the Australian Taxation Office, ACMA is well placed to discourage court challenges. With maximum penalties that read like telephone numbers and the risk of a quadruple or nothing outcome from a court, most businesses will compromise rather than test ACMA’s positions in court, which is why we’d like to see those positions articulated more transparently. If the authority has some good ideas about how to comply with the law, let’s hear them as positive advice rather than deduce them piecemeal from undertakings like Dodo’s and one liners in media releases.
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