January, 13 2020 3:29 pm
When you are operating an outbound call center, compliance with the TCPA - or Telephone Consumer Protection Act - is crucial. Not only does this compliance mean you’re doing your job correctly - it is what keeps you from losing your legal right to operate at all!
With such a premium placed on outbound compliance, it’s no wonder so many outbound call center agents worry about meeting these regulations and what will happen if they don’t. This doesn’t have to be a fear in your facility if you train your agents toward compliance throughout their tenure at your center. Here, we will examine ways to ensure compliance at every step of the communications process - and how you can build in the training you provide to your agents regularly.
It may seem strange at first glance, but educating your consumers and clients is one of the best ways to ensure you are staying within the regulations for outbound call compliance. How? Because without an understanding of these laws, your consumers may errantly report your agents for simply doing their job - or they may not understand their own rights concerning the calls you are making.
Your efforts should be focused on two things: supplying necessary information about the specifications and limitations of the TCPA laws, and ensuring that you are collecting express permission for contacting the individuals on your contact list. Without that permission, you may not be entitled to future communications with them. Depending on the type of center you are operating, it may be worthwhile to look into investing in a solution for collecting and organizing these permissions so that they can easily be accessed later.
To ensure you are providing accurate information to your consumers, it is important to thoroughly and accurately educate your agents, too. They can then share that knowledge with the consumer upon request - or as needed to prevent complaints. Remember, just a few hours of training and education can resolve numerous problems and prevent many more from occurring.
To ensure outbound call compliance, it isn’t enough to educate your clients and consumers. You must also educate your staff members as part of your training efforts.
It is important to note that local, state, and federal laws are always changing; there are frequent adjustments that should be made to training materials. This applies to the subject of compliance training as much as it does to anything else. Your managers should frequently invest their time and money in updated training for themselves and their staff. This helps to ensure that agents understand the laws that they are working under - and that their managers understand the material well enough to guide them through it and counsel consumers, as well.
Outbound call center agent training is one of the most important investments you can make, both financially and in terms of time invested. Too many centers wait until a problem arises to address the issue of proper compliance, leaving employees and managers alike dealing with the fallout from these scenarios. You can easily prevent these problems by training and educating proactively. Make agent training a priority in your outbound contact center and enjoy the major benefits of complete compliance!
Training is made all the more effective when you have real-world examples to offer your agents. Where can you find these examples? In the real phone calls they are making every day in your center! By implementing a call recording solution, you can collect information from real calls and share it with agents privately or during group training as a method of providing feedback and examples for training. Few techniques are more effective when training toward compliance than providing examples that pertain to actual tasks your agents do every day.
What’s better than analyzing past calls to check for compliance? Monitoring those calls in real-time, of course! Employee monitoring has always been an important factor in ensuring that your outbound call center agents are performing at the level you mandate. Why not employ it for ensuring compliance, too?
With live, real-time agent monitoring, you have several benefits that pre-recording does not offer. One of the biggest of these is that management team members can intercede quickly if a problem arises. There are several ways to do this. Either a manager can use the whisper feature - allowing them to speak directly to the agent on a line that only the agent can hear - and coach the agent through the problem, or they can use call barging. Call barging allows the manager to actually take over the call and resolve the issue with both the agent and consumer. This is a more drastic measure, but when the issue of compliance is on the line, it can be a necessary one.
One of the biggest challenges for modern contact centers in remaining compliant to outbound calling laws is that these regulations inhibit the streamlined pace that most are hoping to achieve. Automated dialers and their use are heavily regulated, which makes making frequent calls in large numbers more difficult than it might otherwise be.
However, that doesn’t mean that your center can’t achieve your goals while still remaining compliant. The task is simply one that requires more focus and more effort - and better technology to facilitate it.
When you’re ready to invest in the technology necessary to help your outbound call center agents remain compliant while performing at the level you expect and require of them, talk to the industry leaders at ChaseData. Experts in all aspects of outbound call center compliance, we offer the software solutions your center needs to keep things running smoothly and keep meeting your compliance and sales goals alike. Give us a call today to learn more!