The Campaign Aims to Reduce Silent Calls, Improve Outbound Productivity and Simplify Ofcom Compliance.

London, UK, House of Commons Approves Draft Statutory Instrument to Increase Fine for Non-Compliance to £2,000,000.

London, UK — Altitude Software, today announced it is launching a campaign asking the contact centre industry to join forces in campaigning for simplified answer machine identification.

The “Love the Beep” Campaign is now online with an information and survey site to gather industry support for new legislation requiring telcos and service providers to play a brief tone immediately on connecting an answering service. This very simple technical improvement would enormously help contact centres outbound calls compliance with Ofcom regulation on “silent calls” and AMD “false positives”, with no downside whatsoever for users and service providers.

“As Altitude is a supplier to the contact centre outbound industry, we decided we should do something to help outbound contact centre operators deal with the problems in running Ofcom compliant outbound campaigns” comments Richard Woollaston, General Manager for Altitude Software UK. “The big problem is not just achieving compliance, but proving it. The introduction of ‘false positives’ into the abandoned call rate means you now have to guess at the number of people your system incorrectly identifies as answer machines”. At the upcoming Call Centre Expo (Birmingham, 21-22 September) Altitude Software is going to actively promote the idea and get the support of industry players.

The “Love the Beep” campaign aims to hugely simplify the job a Contact Centre AMD system has to do. It proposes that providers of network answering services play a short ‘beep’ immediately after the call is answered. AMD systems can be tuned to listen for and recognise the “beep”, which means, for contact centres, taking out the guesswork in determining false positives, and running a more productive and compliant operation. As for the people being called, they will have an improved perception of the calls they are answering as the delay in an agent replying will be greatly reduced.

“The increased fine for non-compliance of up to £2 million is a huge risk for contact centres using AMD technology” says Richard Woollaston. “In turn this will damage the prospects for an industry that offers employment for thousands of people. The players in this game need to deal with the issue end to end rather than tinkering with regulations that present substantial compliance difficulties.”

Altitude Software starts running this campaign at Call Centre Expo 2010. It will then present the survey results to Ofcom, the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the network operators, in an attempt to get them to act in the interests of the contact centre industry.