Latest FCC Report and Order: What This Means for Your Business
by Serge Hyppolite on February 23rd, 2012
In a Report and Order issued February 15, 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sought to create uniformity between the FCC and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls.
In the two years prior to this decision, many telemarketing companies have been required to adhere to FTC regulations, which have been more strict than those enforced by the FCC. This order brings the FCC’s standards for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls in line with the FTC’s standards.
In essence, the new FCC Report and Order requires the following conditions for all autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls to wireless and residential lines:
- Company must have express prior written consent from the consumer. An existing business relationship is no longer considered consent.
- Consumer must have the ability to verbally opt out during a recorded call; or, if a voicemail has been left, the consumer must be able to call back and opt out.
- Company must maintain an abandoned call rate of 3% or lower for each calling campaign, over a 30-day period.
- Calls made by health care-related entities to residential lines relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) are exempt from TCPA requirements.
Who is Affected?
Many contact centers may already be in compliance with these new, more strict FCC rules. Businesses that have been required to comply with FTC regulations will experience no change in operations from the FCC Order.
Those that will be impacted fall into a group of businesses that the FTC had classified as “exempted groups.” These groups include common carriers, banks, credit unions, savings and loans, companies engaged in the business of insurance and airlines, and agencies conducting intrastate telemarketing calls.
This subset of businesses, including telemarketers, that have been operating as exempted groups and following the FCC’s less restrictive guidelines over the past two years will be directly affected by the FCC’s new Order.
Still Awaiting Further Decisions
The FCC’s new Report and Order does not address the TCPA telemarketer liability standard issue, which still remains under consideration at the FCC. This issue requires the FCC to determine whether companies would be held strictly liable for the actions of the third party telemarketers they contracted for services, or whether an agency standard would apply, which would shift the liability to the third party.
Although the decision regarding enforcement of an agency standard could have far-reaching consequences for the telemarketing industry, we are monitoring this decision closely and will bring you the latest information as it becomes available.
Next Steps: Achieving Compliance
As a leading provider of solutions that enable proactive outreach for sales, customer service and collections processes, Aspect can help companies achieve optimal productivity while complying with the latest TCPA rules. Our unified solution, Aspect® Unified IP®, offers a number of advantages that will help you ensure compliance.
For example, organizations can set call filters to avoid contacting consumers who have not provided express prior written consent. Parameters that control the pacing of the system can be set to operate within the two-second and 3% abandoned rules. And a built-in IVR self-service component enables consumers to opt out in an automated fashion.
Learn more by downloading Aspect’s complementary report, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA): Guideline for Aspect customers on the latest FCC Report and Order.
For specific guidance on how to configure your environment to comply with these regulations, we encourage Aspect customers to contact their account representatives or appropriate Aspect partners.
We also invite you to attend Aspect’s informational webinar, Achieving TCPA Compliance, scheduled for March 7. Register for this event now.
Modeling company-customer collaboration
by Serge Hyppolite on March 18th, 2011
In garages, basements, and makeshift workshops, a legion of amateur Edisons have been quietly improving existing products or combining components to create new ones. A recent New York Times story profiled Eric von Hippel, a professor at MIT, who conducted a study of British consumers and found that 2.9 million individuals had pursued innovation in the previous three years.
For the longest time, this activity occurred totally under the radar. More recently, however, global companies have begun to recognize the value in tapping into these networks of engaged consumers to integrate their ideas into product offerings. As in many other areas of the business, the emergence of social media technologies that facilitate real-time dialogue and collaboration has been crucial in bringing these ideas into online spaces. …Read more >
Achieving the full benefits of a multichannel contact center
by Serge Hyppolite on March 9th, 2011
Much has been written about the heightened expectations of today’s consumers: how social media and technology have made everything available to them in real time; how they’ve become information seekers; and how they interact with one another and with companies across multiple communications channels.
For many executives in customer-facing industries, the very mention of social media can ignite a mix of consternation, worry, and annoyance. What company has the unlimited resources to add capabilities every time another communications channel gains critical mass? Anecdotes about contact centers deploying service agents to monitor Twitter and other social media channels to address customer complaints don’t seem grounded in the reality of most businesses.
So how should a company integrate multiple channels into their contact center—to learn to stop worrying and love social media (to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove)?
Stay sequential—Just as babies generally need to crawl before they can walk, companies shouldn’t try to get ahead of their current capabilities. The worst thing a business can do is to add functionality before understanding how all the pieces fit together. Often, a business might want to integrate social media into its operations but can’t afford to do so in the short term. However, the important thing is that its platform must be able to handle these tools going forward. Therefore, any long-term, sustainable strategy for adopting multichannel capabilities begins with selecting the right platform.
Think of it as just another channel—If social media is inciting panic attacks at your company, it might help to think of it as just one more mode of communication—no different than e-mail was ten years ago. Instead, companies should recognize that contact center technology can now accommodate these channels. From a monitoring perspective, customer notifications can come in from anywhere—tweets, Facebook posts, blogs. Tweets or Facebook posts can be routed to contact center agents in the same way that phone calls are now—if you have selected the right platform (see above).
Recognize the inherent value—The question isn’t whether companies need to address the social media opportunity but how much value they can capture from it. For example, imagine a financial institution that has 100,000 high-risk borrowers. The cost of reaching them manually would be prohibitive; with the right outbound SMS capabilities, however, the financial institution can automatically send a reminder text message to each customer that includes a URL to an online payment center. By assessing business strategy, companies can determine which solutions can most readily support their objectives and determine the right time to implement these tools.
For companies that have invested in a unified platform, it’s very straightforward to plug in social media, because UC was designed to handle all types of social media. Aspect has developed products that allow companies to integrate channels effortlessly into the contact center. Stay tuned for more details.
In the meantime, what are your questions about integrating social media into your operations? What steps has your organization taken to make this a reality?
Aspect Unified IP 7 – Enterprise Routing, Unified Command and Control, & High Availability
by Serge Hyppolite on January 11th, 2011
Aspect’s Serge Hyppolite discusses the Contextual Enterprise Routing, Unified Command and Control, and High Availability capabilities in Aspect Unified IP 7.
The Ultimate in Enabling a Virtual Workforce: Unified Communications and At Home Agents
by Serge Hyppolite on October 28th, 2010
Jet Blue Airlines is famous for it. Amazon does it. So does 1-800-FLOWERS. But do their customers know? Probably not.
For many reasons, including reduced facilities costs; lowering carbon footprints from less commuting; and the ability to hire from a more diverse workforce that includes stay-at-home moms, students, and even retirees; the trend of companies moving contact center agents to work from home has been growing. In large part, the prevalence of technologies like software-based contact center solutions and voice over IP (VoIP) have enabled this shift – making it as easy for companies to manage contact centers within a single site as it is to manage multiple sites, including people at their individual homes – while still delivering a seamless customer experience.
Now, imagine for a moment if your capabilities with at-home agents went beyond just being able to route calls to them, went further than being able to coach and monitor them. Imagine a world where you could communicate with them in real time via instant message (IM) or share desktop screens automatically. What if your agents were able to literally drag a supervisor into a customer call with the click of their mouse to help resolve a given issue? In this world, first call resolution goes through the roof. Customer satisfaction reaches all-time highs. And, agent productivity attains unprecedented levels.
This is the world of leveraging unified communications (UC) technologies for at-home agents. Whether you are doing customer service, sales, or collections, UC capabilities like IM, desktop sharing, and one-click conferencing, make it infinitely easier to interact internally, as well as with your customers. With UC, at-home agents have limitless resources at their fingertips – with the ability to reach out and interact with colleagues and superiors instantaneously in real time – helping to delight customers in a whole new way.
And, we haven’t even touched on how unified communications can reduce infrastructure costs for these at-home agents – we’ll save that for a later day.
UC is a journey that begins with thinking strategically about how your organization could benefit from and adapt to its possibilities.
Do you have work-at-home agents? Have you thought about how you can better arm them to deliver on your brand promise using UC?
So we’ve met Consumer 2.0. Now what?
by Serge Hyppolite on September 22nd, 2010
Consumers’ demands have been shifting at a rapid rate, especially when it comes to interacting with companies and the services they provide. Keeping up with those demands from a technology perspective can be quite challenging, as there are many different ways that you can accommodate your customers’ growing needs. One of the most critical and effective ways to support them today, however, is with a next-generation contact center platform.
This next-generation contact center platform is a software-based model that leverages unified communications and collaboration technologies that can seamlessly connect the enterprise with the contact center and the customer. It brings together all of the capabilities required in a unified platform designed to provide a rich and consistent customer experience across all contact channels.
Some of the essential elements that make up the next-generation contact center platform are:
- Advanced technologies that bring customer contact processes into the enterprise
- Standards-based technology
- Seamless, multi-channel capabilities
- Blended capabilities to support intelligent outbound (proactive) and inbound contact
- Unified communications capabilities, including rich presence, instant messaging and multimedia conferencing
- Capabilities that leverage social networks, online communities, web portals and enterprise search and knowledge stores
- Tightly integrated workforce optimization capabilities
- Support for consolidated customer relationship management (CRM) views
And trust me, I know it isn’t a simple task to move to a new platform – but it’s one that is necessary for the future of your company and your consumers. The good news is – there are opportunities to bring in new capabilities as needed without a forklift upgrade that will allow you to better balance consumer demands with your bottom line realities. That’s why it’s important to begin planning now for what your organization will need in the not so distant future to ensure your service is meeting customer demands.
If you haven’t begun changing or planning for a change in your legacy contact center model, what is holding you back?
Harnessing the Power of UC in the Contact Center for the Greatest Good
by Serge Hyppolite on September 9th, 2010
Unified communications (UC) offers powerful capabilities. I’ve talked before about best practices for converting reluctant contact center agents into UC advocates. Ironically, after agents have experienced the technology’s communications advantages, like instant messaging (IM), the initial business challenge of underuse can turn to overuse or the risk of misuse.
Patience and Diligence Are Rewarded When Taking a Measured Approach to OCS
by Serge Hyppolite on September 2nd, 2010
There are several ways to plot a comfortable learning curve for contact center agents beginning to use UC capabilities. In my last post, I suggested considering a phased deployment for operations that have legacy PBX. Another best practice with a consistent payoff is pilot testing unified communications deployment with a small team of users. This gradual approach produces two advantages that are worth the wait. The first is the opportunity to test and optimize functionality for broader agent use, and what might be an even greater boon to an effective rollout is earning the test group’s buy-in to drive up interest and user adoption. Fear of the unknown is no match for the contagion of enthusiasm. After phone-only users shift to an empowered UC platform experience like Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS), they quickly put the past behind them. And they may actually look forward to future technology advances that enable even better communications in their next-generation contact center.
Creating an Engaging UC Experience for Agents Equals Improved Customer Experience
by Serge Hyppolite on August 26th, 2010
Every customer and every contact center agent have at least one thing in common – a singular focus on resolving an issue in one transaction. But even when the customer happily experiences a “one and done” outcome, agents aren’t finished until they’ve done their best to repeat that result with every possible opportunity. The challenge of this reality is that repetitive tasks can become tedious and even thankless for agents when satisfying the customer becomes difficult. This is often the biggest contributor to high agent turnover in the contact center.
How Do You Make a Strong Start with Enterprise 2.0?
by Serge Hyppolite on May 19th, 2010
Fully embracing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities may seem like it takes some extremely long arms. The potential for embedding communications into business applications and processes reaches far and wide, extending to the contact center, the back office and beyond. Customer care, mobility and websites and portals are all areas of considerable opportunity. And the real-time, collaborative power of communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) and social media to increase efficiency and productivity will only continue to evolve and profoundly influence these spaces.
So how do you decide where to begin in adopting CEBP and social software and media capabilities? What’s the best way to adapt them to your organization’s existing workflows or processes? One target for relatively easy, low-risk wins is any area where siloed operations present business challenges. Other likely, high-value opportunities are business processes stalled or complicated by human latency, or those that require different types of people with different sets of skills. Wherever business processes are bottlenecked, there exists the potential for huge gains from incorporating CEBP and social media capabilities.
What other starting points do you recommend for early success?
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.