Following Ofcom’s announcement on the 1st March 2006, fines of up to £50,000 will be brought against contact centres if they fail to comply with the new regulations. The rules stipulate that abandoned or silent calls must be less than three per cent of all calls during a 24 hour period. Previously the voluntary figure was set at five per cent.
Netcall's call back products, QueueBuster and CallMeBack, secure an agent before putting calls through to a customer. This eliminates the risk of silent calls which occur when predictive dialler systems generate more calls than available agents can answer.
Richard Farrell, Netcall's Technical Principal, comments: “The tragedy is that fines are required to eliminate silent calls at all. These nuisance calls are caused mainly by the unscrupulous use of predictive diallers, which were designed to deliver productivity not customer satisfaction. This approach to product development has contributed to negative perceptions of the contact centre industry by the general public.
“It is time for the industry to make customer experience a priority when implementing contact centre technology. Netcall’s solutions are built around customer satisfaction and demonstrate that it is possible to make automated outbound calls without any risk whatsoever of silent calls.”
Richard Farrell continues: “There are alternatives to predictive diallers for many business processes. Solutions designed around customer service can still deliver contact centre agent productivity. At Netcall, we are happy that the Regulator is to investigate the silent calls issue further and hope this will mark the point when the entire UK contact centre industry starts to take customer satisfaction seriously.”