It’s not surprising that it did, because Microsoft’s findings – based on feedback from 20,000 people in 11 countries – highlighted a number of fascinating trends that home and hybrid working seems to have reinforced. The first of these is “productivity paranoia” 87% of employees reported that they were productive, but only 12% of their managers said that they were confident of their teams’ productivity. View Microsoft research here.

So, what are we to make of that?

Firstly, it might be that there has always been such a chasm in workers’ and bosses’ perceptions of their productivity, but that’s not what Microsoft conclude. So, at a minimum, the past couple of years has made managers less confident that they know what their teams are doing, how well they are doing it and how quickly. Microsoft thinks that a lot of that is due to managers lacking information, data and reporting that tells them about their employees’ performance.

That will still be at least partially true of some contact centre people working from home, but overall contact centre managers have far more employee performance data than their peers in just about any other type of business, pre or post Covid. But we know that there is still plenty of managerial “productivity paranoia” in home working and hybrid contact centres.

On the surface, contact centre managers’ “productivity paranoia” is surprising. We all know that one of the great strengths of contact centres is their ability to generate statistics. Unlike lots of areas of work, nearly all of which will have to a greater or lesser experienced a move towards full or partial home working over the past 2½ years, contact centre managers are knee-deep in management information about their employees’ performance.

However, most times the easiest stuff to measure is, arguably, the least important. We know about wait times, call durations and throughputs per hour, but far less easy to measure is experience, genuine resolution of queries and emotional engagement with customers. And that challenge isn’t much greater just because someone’s working at home than when they are sat in front of their boss.

A further complication is that the kind of contact centre activities which are very easy to define, target and measure are ideal candidates for automation and/or process improvement (most likely in your organisation’s digital self-service real estate and tools). So the challenge here is not to manage these activities more efficiently, but get rid of them altogether. In a sense, if you are wholly confident of your team’s base efficiency then you might just know a lot about the wrong things.

It looks like what Microsoft’s research crystalises is that the shift in working styles and locations has unearthed some hidden problems. Ones that have always been there but were easier to ignore when everyone was always in the same, shared location. However, the good news is that these are problems that contact centre managers should actually be closer to being able to address than their peers in other sectors.

If you’d like to discuss how different technologies and techniques can help you address some of these challenges and do your bit to banish “productivity paranoia”, just drop us a line.

PS As an aside, if you’re that rare exception to “productivity paranoia” and your boss is convinced that you are more productive than you actually are, then that’s a very different challenge. And anecdotal evidence suggests that having an idiot boss is more double-edged than you may at first think!

Unfortunately, mystery shopping and benchmarking can be quite tedious and a lengthy undertaking. But recently a colleague and I carried out a mystery shopping assessment for a client operating in a competitive financial service environment.

So equipped with Neville Doughty’s recent article ‘The Triple Threat: 3 key challenges facing contact centres’, which highlighted ‘staff attraction and retention, channel shift and automation’ as major current challenges to contact centres, I’ve mused on what my bit of mystery shop benchmarking might tell us.

1. Bots still aren’t that common and often just don’t work

Surprisingly, only 2 of the 12 companies use webchat and none of the others actively promote any social media messaging apps as customer service channels. Both of those companies also had a Bot. But neither Bot recognised any standard terms or phrases related to their proposition or service that we used, so consequently none of our contacts were ‘contained’ and managed by the Bots

2. Other elements of best practice or useful technologies are under-represented

• Despite long call wait times, only 2 companies offered ‘queue buster’ opportunities for customers to stop queuing and automatically book a call-back
• 4 companies presented customers with standard customer service queries with 6 or more IVR options
• Only 2 companies offered voice recognition IVR

3. Service levels are all over the place

Across the 12 companies the average call answer time varied by a factor of 26 to 1 (41 seconds was the shortest average, 1075 – that’s nearly 18 minutes – was the longest)

4. There’s no ‘settled view’ about acceptable, live-agent opening hours

Some companies were only available to customers Monday to Friday, and some also open on Saturdays. A few opened on Sundays, too and one – surprisingly an ‘app-first’ online challenger brand – was available 24 hours per day, across all contact channels. This results in their having total weekly open hours 4 times the number of its least accessible competitor

These are challenging times for brands and their contact centres, but options and possibilities to do things differently and better abound. If you’d like to discuss how different technologies, resourcing and customer propositions might help your hard-pressed contact centre operation, just get in touch.

Thought so. In which case how do you fancy tackling the low pay and high inflation conundrum (as no one else seems to know what to do about it) of contact centre salaries?

It is not an attractive prospect, is it? However, you or your team are probably already doing just that, in small ways. I recently spoke to an operational leader who has agreed that a handful of their most vulnerable employees can get ‘first dibs’ at the weekly food donations gathered across the centre for a local food bank. People’s financial circumstances are highly variable and not always linked to the macroeconomic situation. However, right now a lot of people working in contact centres will be feeling more financially exposed than they have in years, or possibly ever.

The backdrop to all this is two-fold:

The bosses are getting richer

In the US the pay gap between CEOs’ and median workers’ earnings in 300 major firms has now stretched to 670:1. In the UK things are a bit fairer, but Reuters has reported that, based on company results published in 2022 up to early summer, CEOs were paid 63 times as much as their median employee’s salary. Bear in mind that’s the median (“mid-way”) salary point, not the lowest. In most companies traditionally low-paid jobs like cleaning, catering and security will have been outsourced long ago. So, in many organisations, the largest group of relatively low-paid employees are likely to be found in your contact centre – whether that’s in your corporate offices, at home or a bit of both. Of course, some or all of the customer management and contact centre operations may have been outsourced, too, but low-paid and financially struggling outsourced representatives of your brand are still your problem!

Contact centre salaries remain low

Despite the nature of the roles getting progressively more complex and challenging, contact centre salaries, in-house or outsourced, have remained stubbornly relatively low for over two decades (as ContactBabel’s long-term research results demonstrate), certainly before the ‘Great Resignation’.

So, what on earth can you do about it? Unless you have an especially well-funded and guilt-ridden executive team and shareholders it will be a variation on the old theme. That is, how to maximise the value generated by your operation and the customer interactions it is responsible for.

More than ever, the insight you hold into what are the broken processes and failed communications that drive unnecessary contacts is truly valuable. Make a nuisance of yourself and use a time of change and uncertainty to champion what your organisation needs to do for its customers. Only then can you either allow your people to focus more on value generation and be in a better position to argue for pay and rewards that can help them avoid the worse effects of the cost of living crunch.

If you’d like to discuss your current employment challenges or how to help drive and demonstrate more value from your contact centre operation, just drop us a line.

However, if you work in contact centres and you were around from 2017 to 2018 when the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the last Data Protection Act went live, you may be less excited about the prospect of more change!

Following the previous Bill, millions of working days were spent trying to figure out what it all meant in practical terms; changing processes and procedures; ditching databases; confusing consumers with millions of ‘would you still like to hear from us’? emails; and preparing for a tsunami of data rights request contacts which never really happened.

Well, the good news is that the recently proposed Bill looks a lot more like a sensible tidying up of the rules (and the slightly vague promise of less data protection bureaucracy and admin), rather than a radical overhaul. The fundamentals will remain the same. The post-Brexit UK version of the GDPR will remain in place, alongside the 2018 Data Protection Act. For a business this is doubly reassuring, not only does it suggest fewer revisions and re-work to existing policies and processes, but it also means that it’s less likely that the UK’s rules will deviate so far from the EU’s that we lose our prized ‘adequacy’ status, which allows UK firms to process and transfer personal data with the EU with little friction.

There are many areas covered by the proposed Bill, but for most of us the key elements are:

• Fines for PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) infringements will increase from a maximum of £500,000 to the GDPR level of up to £17.5m or 4% of global turnover. PECR fines tend to cover contact centres calling without TPS screening their call lists and the sending of ‘spam’ texts and emails without permission.
• Charities and political parties will get a boost to their fundraising capabilities by being granted the same license to use the ‘soft opt-in’ to send emails and texts messages as private sector firms.
• The cookie rules will be adjusted so that the need to get consent for the placement of certain non-essential cookies will be waived. This should mean a lot fewer Cookie pop-up banners in future.
• The government says it will cut the admin burden of the current rules by reducing the need for Data Protection Officers (DPOs), Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) and Records of Processing Activities. Instead, firms will be required to conduct Privacy Management Programmes. It’s not clear what all this means, but it may offer relief to some firms and contact centres.
• If you have been inundated by tricky or unreasonable data rights requests there may be a glimmer of good news. The new Bill will change the basis on which you can decline to action a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) from “manifestly unfounded or excessive” to the slightly less demanding “vexatious or excessive”.

If you would like to discuss these forthcoming changes and review your current approach to ensuring data protection and privacy, please drop us a line.

Source information: Data Reform Bill

Just before revealing that the new domestic energy bill price cap in October would rise by another £800, on top of a near £700 increase in April, Ofgem said that it was ‘minded to’ change the frequency of the price cap setting. From October the price cap will be set quarterly, partly in the hope that when energy prices do eventually start to go down consumers will be able to benefit more quickly.

So, what does this mean for energy providers, which are already struggling with the consumer impacts of a massively challenged – and arguably dysfunctional – market and high contact volumes?

The cost centre

If you are responsible for an energy supplier’s contact centre you can forget about engaging in the old profit centre versus cost centre discussion. Your operation is now firmly in the cost centre category. The market is effectively dead, with little or no customer migration between suppliers and E.ON warning that 40% of its customers will be experiencing fuel poverty by the autumn.

The support centre

That level of financial exposure amongst consumers means that the high degree of vulnerability awareness that Ofgem has long required will only increase still further. Energy firms’ agents are right in the front-line of the cost-of-living crisis. An increasing proportion of contacts will be looking for support and enquiring about the suppliers’ own schemes as well as the growing range of government support measures. Keeping the front-line team resilient, protected and engaged is a massive challenge for contact centre leaders to add into the mix.

The Insight Centre

But – as we all know – there is one area in which the contact centre excels and that’s acting as the organisation’s ‘eyes and ears’, benefitting from thousands of interactions with customers every day. That insight might now be redundant from a customer acquisition and revenue generation perspective, but it’s more vital than ever when it comes to understanding the customer experience and reducing costs.

In most organisations, one of the biggest drivers of customer contact (and confusion) is the communications the organisation itself generates. With the price cap being adjusted every 3 months then it is almost inevitable that contacts will rise. And this is where the contact centre can really help.

• If people don’t understand how the ‘smoothing’ of bills over the seasons through the use of direct debit works, then show your Product and Marketing colleagues how they can do that better – before the customer calls or chats to ask the contact centre.
• If customers can’t easily find the answers they are looking for through the self-service app or portal then the functionality needs to be shifted and re-ordered to reflect the changed times we are living through.
• If customers are looking for different ways of paying their bills – be that bill-splitting for people in house shares or even a traditional direct debit with the ability to make fractional top-up payments flexibly – then the contact centre should champion the need to develop the customer proposition accordingly.

A quarterly price cap will inevitably just put more strain on the contact centre and its staff, but if the rest of the organisation can be engaged it might just help spur some process and experience improvements along the way.

If you are facing these sorts of challenges, in the energy sector or elsewhere, and would like to talk them through, why not get in touch.

That’s a familiar piece of advice which is credited to John T Chambers, the former boss of Cisco. It’s a comforting mantra for your boss to repeat; it combines displaying respect for staff with a degree of humility.

In the old days, most leaders in the ‘customer world’ could not only say they would be ‘willing’ to do what they asked of their contact centre employees, they could do it too. Technically they might have been a bit slow, but when it came to understanding, empathy and the resolution of customer problems or commercial opportunities they would be confident of their ability to effectively engage with consumers.

That was then. What about now?

Last week a client shared with me some analysis they had done which showed that their frontline advisors were having to use 20 different systems, applications and third-party portals. 20.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1659441626817{padding-bottom: 30px !important;}”]Just think about that for a moment. I’ll be honest, I’m not the world’s greatest multitasker – but even if I was, 20 applications would be about four times the number I’d be confident in using. So, in my client’s contact centre I know I couldn’t do an advisor’s job and if I was the boss I wouldn’t pretend that I’d be willing to either!

It’s a truism that contact centre agents’ jobs have steadily become more difficult over the years. The number of contact channels available and the range of activities undertaken have steadily increased. At the same time the emotional state of customers has often become more heightened either due to their frustration at failing to successfully self-serve or external environmental factors. We all know that the ‘cognitive load’ frontline staff work under seems to have steadily grown and the technology and processes they work with just make matters worse.

So, what can we do about it?

For one, we can start to acknowledge that our people are increasingly doing technically and emotionally challenging jobs that most of us couldn’t. Recognising this fact won’t change anyone’s reality, but it does show a degree of genuine understanding and empathy.

Secondly, we can ensure that the needs of the frontline are front and centre every time new tech, propositions and channels are being planned. There’s a direct line between employee experience and customer experience, so we need to start to make reinforcing that relationship – and helping our frontline people – a priority.

The primary reason for these firms being fined was that they were calling prospects who they didn’t have a prior relationship with, whose numbers were registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). This, as most of us should well know, is illegal. As covered in our previous articles – ICO flurry of fines and BTB sales and marketing ops compliance.

However, when the ICO levies a whole series of fines on firms in the same sector, with similar sales and marketing models, it’s evidence of other underlying concerns. Although the ICO’s Enforcement Notices only refer to 67 consumer complaints, these kinds of collective enforcement actions are invariably evidence of alarm bells ringing at the ICI’s Wilmslow offices about widespread misbehaviour. Here, the ICO has highlighted these firms’ targeting of vulnerable consumers, in this case the elderly.

Targeting the vulnerable elderly

Undoubtedly, judging by the evidence presented by the ICO, this is exactly what these businesses did. While it’s arguably unfair to judge a firm’s sales and marketing practises based on relatively little information, I think we can be confident that these firms were all at the malicious end of the ‘Ignorant vs Complicit’ spectrum of compliance awareness. They seem to have known exactly what they were doing, which is to deliberately target the vulnerable; selling on the basis of worry and fear, not value and consumer benefit, to those least well equipped to make informed decisions.

Scammers stick together

In an interesting example of geographical clustering, 4 out of 5 of the firms were located in East Sussex on the South coast, presumably showing connections to the biggest name in appliance warranty insurance, Domestic & General in Brighton (about which there is no evidence of the ICO having concerns, I hasten to add). So, even scammers like to stick together!

The vast majority of firms don’t set out to exploit or deceive, but

1. Being a legitimate, respectable firm – even a blue-chip brand – is no guarantee you won’t be snared by the ICO, as the Royal Mail, American Express and Saga, which have all recently been hit by enforcement actions and fines, can attest
2. Awareness of the prevalence and importance of vulnerabilities has grown. An understanding of vulnerability had increased before Covid 19, but the pandemic has accelerated it massively. Firms need to be able to both recognise and adapt to prospects and customers who are exhibiting signs of vulnerability

So, what can we learn from this raft of ICO fines? Does the rise of vulnerability awareness just mean that we can no longer sell to older people?

We sought the opinions of some members of the wider Contact Centre Panel network.

Are older consumers too ‘risky’ to market to?

Senior Response is a long-established outsourced contact centre “dedicated to communicating with the older consumer market”. So, what conclusions does Managing Director Michael King draw from the ICO’s slew of fines? Can firms still confidently market and sell to Mature consumers?

“We find that firms which utilise direct mail or online activity prior to commencing telemarketing activity not only have better results but give the customer and prospect the opportunity to know a little bit more about the business and ultimately be more receptive to being contacted.

We work very closely with our clients to ensure that we have a shared Vulnerable Customer policy, which outlines the process if we believe we have a vulnerable customer and what steps to take.

The other point I would stress is that firms should be aware that the adult children or grandchildren of many mature consumers are often part of the decision-making process and therefore your customer journey from marketing to sales, should incorporate this. We often arrange call-backs with our client’s customers to speak with the family member where permission is granted by the customer and requested by the family member. We all want to ensure our parents and elderly relatives are not being taken advantage of by the very things that the ICO have acted on.  It is our view that firms who are proactive in the examples I have mentioned, are more successful in marketing to this rapidly growing market.”

What really is vulnerability?

“Circumstances impact people in different ways – what makes one person vulnerable may affect another quite differently. Age, mental and physical health and financial pressures are all subjective. We believe it is important to communicate with people in the most tailored way possible according to their circumstances and use the tools available to determine what is appropriate.” Helen Lord, CEO, Vulnerability Registration Service

You can find out more about the Vulnerability Registration Service by clicking here

How can technology help?

Can the new technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence play a part in helping firms identify vulnerable prospects and customers – and serve them better, too?

Keith Shanks of Vorth Technology Solutions helps make contact centres work more effectively through the application of AI (artificial intelligence) tools. Can they support centres involved in sales and marketing, especially when they are targeting groups which may contain vulnerable consumers?

“Advances in AI and Machine Learning (ML) now mean that all contact centres are able to highlight potentially vulnerable customers. As has already been highlighted, vulnerability comes in many different forms and it is the responsibility of companies to understand these and act appropriately.

The truth is there is insufficient attention given to vulnerability and if you consider the current economic climate, responsible companies should be paying more attention to the welfare of their customers and the right technology will have a huge impact on this.

We expect a mini-revolution in this field over the next few years as regulators also start using technologies to review and monitor call centre services.”

Financial services: What’s the FCA’s perspective?

Elanev provides dynamic scoring services to contact centres including propensity and best time for contact, propensity for purchase and propensity for financial resilience / vulnerability with no GDPR implication.  Elanev’s John Willoughby gives his practical guidance for the future of such financial product sales and marketing, in light of proposed regulatory changes:

“Financial product sales will be bound by the FCA’s proposed Consumer Duty requiring marketing firms to “deliver good outcomes for retail clients”. The FCA expects all reasonable steps to be taken to avoid causing foreseeable harm to customers. Harm being primarily financial, but may also include mental health effects.

The FCA is requiring firms to have a better understanding of their customers calling out the need to understand customer propensity for vulnerability and to harm. The FCA expects firms to predict behaviour and monitor outcomes recognising the need for data to support this. Common data sources include:

• Own customer data: Can provide a highly granular view of financial vulnerability. But limited if the provider is not the main account holder or does not currently service the customer.
• Financial vulnerability propensity score: Applicable to all customers across the whole UK. Uses outcome data with no personal identifiable details shared to give a daily propensity for financial vulnerability score with no GDPR implication. Cheapest solution available.
• Bureau data: Provides a ~1month lagged measure of financial credit stress which only applies to credit active customers. Lacks information on income, savings, equity or assets, mortgage or rental payments and other commitments limiting it applicability to assessing vulnerability.
• Self-certified data hubs: Customers can self-declare vulnerability. Such hubs rely on customer accuracy and honesty as submissions are not audited. Customers are also unlikely to update submission as their situation changes limiting relevance. Limited coverage doesn’t lend itself to marketing campaigns.
• Open-Banking: Requires individual customer consent. Can lack information on savings, assets and equity. Higher cost limits application in large marketing campaigns.

 To properly identify, quantify and assess vulnerability a combination of data sources may be needed. The specific combination depending on the depth of customer insight that the organisation has and the level of customer consent granted.”

So where does this leave us?

Helen Lord of the Vulnerability Registration Service makes clear that vulnerability isn’t simple or clear cut. The scammers recently fined by the ICO deliberately targeted older people, but not all older people are vulnerable. So, we all need to be more vulnerability aware and unavoidably some customer and prospect groups are likely to contain a higher proportion of people with vulnerabilities. Senior Response is dedicated to engaging and communicating with older people, but as Michael King explains, they do so in a sophisticated way. Senior Response and its clients make use of multiple contact channels and embrace more varied and flexible customer journeys. This might point the way for other sales organisations – and not just for those targeting the ‘grey market’.

A growing role for technology and the insights it can provide seems to be unavoidable and desirable. Vorth Technology Solutions’ Keith Shanks has explained how technologies like his can help identify the ‘growing’ number of vulnerable consumers. John Willoughby from Elanev shows that in the regulated financial services sector, especially, the smarter use of data across a combination of sources is now essential.

The ICO’s fines of exploitative scam marketers doesn’t mean that older consumers are now ‘off limits’ for responsible, ethical firms. But the fines do help highlight the growing importance of being able to recognise and respond to consumer vulnerabilities; not just as an ‘add on’ but in a way that is embedded into processes and customer journeys.

If you require guidance on any of the areas discussed in this article, please contact us.

At the same time, Covid especially has driven significant growth in the demand for multilingual customer service as more and more firms have exploited to shift online to enter new overseas markets.

This is a trend which Contact Centre Panel has been acutely aware of over the past two years, both in the UK and globally. So, if you need to identify and recruit staff who can support customers in languages other than English what are the options available to you?

1. Employ people who are already here

Most multilingual contact centres are supporting European languages, so native language speakers originally from the EU are the most obvious candidates. EU residents who were in the UK by 2021 should have achieved Settled Status so can be employed just like any other resident. However, as nearly all contact centres are reporting massive recruitment and retention challenges, that’s far from easy.

2. Recruit new staff from the EU

This may help, but remember that to do so you will almost certainly have to take advantage of the Skilled Worker Visa Scheme which entails a lot of administration, being approved as an employer by the Home Office and meeting the minimum salary level of £25,600.

3. Recruit Remote Workers in the Country

With the widespread adoption of contact centre homeworking, employing foreign-language speakers to work for you remotely in their own country is now entirely technically feasible. However, the costs and complexity of doing so – especially if you don’t currently employ any staff outside of the EU – can be considerable.

4. Outsource

Outsourcing contact centre customer service isn’t always the right solution for every organisation. But as many of our clients have found, done the right way outsourcing can be a sustainable, affordable solution to the multilingual resourcing challenge.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of these options.

Whether you provide outsourced services from overseas or are a client planning to use an outsourcer with delivery locations outside of your home market, you will be used to planning and managing lots of tasks. For any new outsourcing activity or contract you will have a long list of activities and factors that you need to scope and understand.

Naturally, this will encompass numerous areas under the heading of People, Process and Technology. But for some “getting your head around the costs and risks of foreign exchange management” will need to be added to the list for the first time.

Traditionally, outsourced contact centre providers and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms would handle the foreign exchange currency risk of delivering services from abroad themselves. When the first wave of UK offshore outsourcing started, with the use of India 15 to 20 years ago, this was invariably the case. As time has gone on, though, BPO companies have come to realise that being responsible for delivering ‘flat’ UK prices in the face of variable exchange rates is fraught with risks and potentially an unattractive option. This is even more the case as commonly used locations have expanded to include the Philippines, South Africa and a growing number of central and Eastern European locations outside of the Euro zone.

The range of foreign exchange management approaches agreed between BPOs and their onshore clients is very varied. What they all have in common is both client and provider facing the challenge of who should carry the currency risk, to what extent and for how long.

Options may include:

1. The client is billed simple, ‘flat’ pricing in its local currency (Sterling, say) for the duration of a contract
2. Periodic – usually annual – reviews of pricing, partly or wholly adjusting according to the change in FX rates
3. Every monthly invoice being adjusted to your local ‘paying’ currency – or, more unusually, clients agreeing to pay invoices in the delivery location currency
4. And every variation in between

You might imagine that the larger global BPOs, with both their financial scale and range of operational locations to help defray FX risks, would be more willing to offer clients simple, local currency pricing. However, broadly speaking the opposite is the case and the larger the BPO the more likely they are to look to pass more variable pricing onto their clients. This is probably a function of both:

• Their breadth of experiences – the impacts on contract margins of rapidly depreciated delivery-location currency are likely to be long remembered! And,
• Their usually stringent costs and risk management, which is often demonstrated in their focus on contracting periodic Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) or Retail Price Rate (RPI) of inflation indexes

For some BPOs, as they either enter new territories directly or in partnership with local firms, managing foreign exchange (FX) risks is a new challenge. Both they and their clients will need to take a view on:

1.  The risks of their particular situation (the currency involved and its anticipated volatility, the current and future value of the contract and its duration)
2. The costs of mitigating those risks (e.g. through currency ‘hedging’) as opposed to the potential impact of doing nothing

And finally, it’s worth remembering that currencies can rise as well as fall. There can be a significant upside if the value of a delivery currency falls and thus becomes far cheaper in real world terms for both onshore clients or the BPO business entity in the client’s location.

Still, you might feel that playing at being a Forex trader, with only one deal to your name, may be a stretch too far on top of the day job…

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ‘never said’ that charities were exempt from all or most of the data privacy and protection rules that govern sales and marketing, however many people in the charity sector thought they had an exemption. Plus there were never any enforcement cases or fines of charities, so there was no evidence that the ICO did care about charities’ rule-breaking. 

So what? 

That was and is a very challenging experience for charities, but most of us don’t work in the third sector. So, why the brief history lesson? Because commercial B2B sales and marketing may be about to go through a similar experience.

B2B’s wake up call 

Again, the ICO has ‘definitely’ never said that B2B sales and marketing isn’t covered by the data protection rules, though some aspects of the regulations are less stringent for business communications. However, a lot of B2B players certainly act like they’re excluded from the compliance considerations of their informed and professional B2C peers.  

Why? Well, partly because the ICO never fines organisations for B2B marketing failings. Or at least not until now. 

We all aspire to do the best for our prospects and customers, treat them with respect and in accordance with the law. But, inevitably, when these questions seem to be rather nuanced and not simply black and white, rational organisations will apply a risk assessment to guide their degree and prioritisation of compliance with regulations. So, if you operate B2B and the regulator seems to ignore your sector and business area then it’s reasonable to think that the level of regulatory risk you are exposed to is a lot less than in B2C.

All change 

A fine imposed by the ICO in late December suggests that things have changed. This case, described here, not only created considerable disruption to the operations of Northern Gas & Power, a business energy brokerage company based in Gateshead, it’s resulted in negative publicity, reputational damage and a £75,000 fine.

Northern Gas & Power largely sells its brokerage service to businesses through outbound calling to businesses from its two contact centres in Gateshead and Leeds. Northern operates – or operated – at scale, with over 4 million calls attempts made in the year from May. However, irrespective of volume there are a couple of clear lessons we can all draw from Northern Gas & Power’s experience.

1. Northern failed to screen its calling data against the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) or the TPS’s little-known business number equivalent to the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). As you will probably know, the TPS is the national ‘opt out’ register which needs to be referenced before undertaking any ‘cold’ or unconsented sales and marketing calling. Most B2C organisations are very aware of the TPS, B2B firms often less so – and the CTPS is largely forgotten by nearly everybody.

That will need to change.

2. When the GDPR arrived here (as the 2018 Data Protection Act in the UK) there was a lot of talk about the fuzzy lines between individuals and companies. You can email hello@contactcentrepanel.com and that’s a business address, but sullivan@contactcentrepanel.com is my personal data. Similarly, the Contact Centre Panel office number 0114 2096120 isn’t anyone’s personal data (though it could be registered with the CTPS and thus off-limits), but my mobile number is. And for many companies, personal email and mobile will be the only way of making contact.

All these aspects need to be thought through, understood and managed.

3. Northern purchased prospect data, but did not undertake appropriate due diligence of its suppliers to ensure they were compliant and reputable. It failed to ensure robust, defensible contracts were in place with its suppliers and didn’t test or audit the data supplied.

Buying third party data is now one of the most potentially fraught and risky activities an organisation can undertake and needs to be handled with deliberation and care. 

4. As the ICO’s enforcement notice makes clear, Northern’s operational management, internal controls and processes were poor. Added to which its contact management systems – and Northern’s team’s ability to manage them – was very deficient, directly leading to poor data management and ensuring suppression requests were actioned.

Northern Gas & Power has experienced considerable growth and apparent success, but without sound operational, data and technology underpinnings, continued success is increasingly difficult to sustain 

Whether you exclusively market to businesses or do so in combination with targeting consumers, the ICO’s latest move strongly suggests that B2B has lost any real or imagined status as a data protection compliance exception.

Contact Centre Panel boasts many years of collective experience in B2C and B2B customer targeting, acquisition and service, supplemented by a deep but pragmatic understanding of how to design and operate business models compliantly. Contact Centre Panel can offer clients

• Tested relationships with a variety of B2B specialist customer experience and contact centre service providers
• A selection of best in breed technology solution providers to help meet customer contact and data challenges
• A select group of both B2C and B2B data providers, identified after an extensive process of legal, financial and compliance due diligence

Lesson 3 – Who’s calling?

About a quarter of all ICO fines – and half of the phone-based enforcement cases – involve the incorrect use of Caller Line Identification (CLI) numbers. As you probably know, there are the numbers presented on the customer’s phone when you call them.

Again, it’s Ofcom that sets the rules and regulations about the use of CLIs, but it’s the ICO who are pushing fines and enforcement. Misusing CLIs is a red flag to the regulator.

Simply put, CLIs should clearly identify the recipient of the call, be dialable, consistent and not confuse or mislead the consumer. In addition, if the customer rings the CLI number back you need to be able to inform the customer who you are and why you were ringing them.

That probably sounds very straightforward and you may be very confident about your use of CLIs. But that might not always be the case even when you feel you are being reasonable and fair:

• You could have several different offices or locations. Would it be wrong to cycle a variety of those numbers when calling to maximise answer rates?
• Or you might use the local office number when calling people who you know live nearest to that area. Is that ok?
• You know your customers or prospects are less likely to answer a call from a geographic, landline number. Can you use a mobile number CLI instead?
• What if for reporting or inbound call handling reasons it makes sense for you to use a different CLI for each campaign you run. How many different CLIs are too many?
• Or what if you’re running a collections campaign and know that your most hard-to-reach debtors will recognise and not answer your CLIs. Surely, it’s ok to vary the CLIs then? Isn’t it?

Sadly, the answers to these questions aren’t always clear, but you need to work out your approach and justification if you want to avoid damaging legal action and fines. Need a hand? Let us know.