FTC Battle Scars: Compliance Lessons Learned from a Call Center Expert

Call center compliance was at the heart of our panel with the PACE (Professional Association for Customer Engagement) virtual summit. The theme of this year’s annual conference, “Leveraging Change for Success,” focused on how businesses can navigate the complexities of a fluctuating compliance landscape. 

During the panel, “FTC Battle Scars: Lessons Learned from a Call Center Expert,” Heather Griffin, call center consultant and Chief Revenue Officer at Dvinci Energy, shared her experience and lessons learned from an intensive FTC compliance investigation with a former call center. Bringing the panel discussion full circle to address how outbound call centers can stay ahead of compliance were Helen Mac Murray, Partner at Mac Murray & Shuster LLP, and Nima Hakimi, Convoso CEO and Co-founder. 

DISCLAIMER: The information on this page, and related links, is provided for general education purposes only and is not legal advice. Convoso does not guarantee the accuracy or appropriateness of this information to your situation. You are solely responsible for using Convoso’s services in a legally compliant way and should consult your legal counsel for compliance advice. Any quotes are solely the views of the quoted person and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Convoso.

The panelists’ discussion on call center compliance covered: 

• A first-hand account of an FTC investigation
• Key takeaways from the experience
• Best practices for supporting outbound call center compliance
• Important features to have in your dialer software 

Explore some of the panel highlights from the recap below, or watch the full video to hear even more about how you can take action to protect your business and support compliance.

[Video of panel discussion coming soon!]
Note: Nothing in this video or recap constitutes legal advice. Convoso recommends retaining and consulting an attorney for ongoing guidance on regulatory compliance.

A First-Hand Experience of FTC Action

FTC bust-ups of fraudulent activity regularly capture headlines. But it’s not just bad actors who get caught up in the agency’s dragnet.

“When you hear things like, ‘FTC Nabs a Robocaller,’ what you’re usually thinking about is someone committing fraud or taking money from senior citizens. You’re not thinking about a company like we were,” said Heather Griffin, who ran a call center in 2019 investigated by the FTC.

“Our company had all intentions of being compliant. We were dialing opt-in data, we were being audited [by a] third-party, we were doing the things we thought we were supposed to be doing…We weren’t hiding from anything. Our clients were Fortune 100 companies. We thought we were doing the right thing.”

One day though, the company received a questionnaire from the FTC. “We, [in hindsight] maybe naively, just filled out the questions and sent them back,” Griffin recalled. But what seemed like a run-of-the-mill inquiry soon turned into an aggressive investigation.

“They quickly came in and started investigating fast. They were very forceful. There wasn’t a lot of negotiation that they were willing to discuss. They had convinced themselves that we were a bad actor.”

A Far-Reaching Investigation Leads to Stiff Penalties

Despite thinking they had done their due diligence on TCPA compliance, the investigators exposed vulnerabilities in the company’s compliance approach. 

“The FTC was ruthless. At some point they exported all of our dial records without our knowledge and asked for an opt-in for every one of 14 million records…And this was before ActiveProspect and Jornaya. A lot of those data vendors [that we used years before] were gone.”

At the end of the investigation, the FTC handed down serious penalties. While they left the company open, the FTC’s stipulated order forced the owner to relinquish control of the company and his shares in it.

Key Takeaways from Experience with FTC

Despite the difficulty of the experience, Griffin came away with many valuable lessons to share with other companies.

Rely on an Expert

Griffin’s biggest takeaway was that, despite how well-prepared they thought they were, her company still needed an outside expert on their side. “Even with the best intentions, we made mistakes,” she said. “So what I learned from that process is that you really need an attorney, a third-party, or someone who is really an expert to look at your business and how it’s running.”

Mac Murray, who represented Griffin’s organization during the ordeal, echoed this. Maintaining compliance isn’t as simple as looking at a set of rules and taking action, she said. 

“There were many things I had learned that came from interacting with regulators [over the course of my career]. And none of this information is in the statutes or rules, in any book, or on any website.” In short, there’s no substitute for experience. 

And you need that experience on your side from the get-go.“The first thing I would have recommended that they do differently,” Mac Murray said, “would have been not to respond to that first inquiry. Because the FTC is so against everybody that they investigate, you have to start defending yourself with literally the first phone call.”

Best Practices for a Proactive Approach to Compliance

With the benefit of hindsight—and Mac Murray’s expertise—Griffin walked through a number of best practices call centers can implement to help prevent a similar fate for their own companies. These included:

• Audit your third-party data providers.   Knowing that all your data is compliant is crucial. As Griffin put it, “At the end of the day, [the FTC] didn’t care if it was the vendor [who was at fault.] We were the ones who dialed, and we were responsible.”
• Scrub against a litigator list like DNC.com or Blacklist Alliance.   Griffin says that you will probably find a surprised by the number of potential litigators among your data. “If I’m buying five to ten thousand new opt-ins a day, I’m getting four to five hundred people on these litigator lists that are then blocked [and not dialed].”
• Maintain a data retention schedule.   Nima Hakimi said to work with your dialer partner to ensure your data is correctly backed up so that you can prove compliance. “It’s really important to be proactive around how you’re going to keep the data and your records. Ask your dialing provider how long they are going to keep it, how often it is going to be backed up. Because a lot of the time if you don’t say anything it will just be deleted after a certain number of days.” This is essential since, as Mac Murray mentioned, the FTC statute of limitations is 6 years—and there are state regulators who have no statute of limitations at all.
• Conduct a third-party internal audit.   A team of outside experts can tell you where your weaknesses are and help you get a process in place. Because a lot of the issues at stake are not black-and-white, Mac Murray said, an audit can tell you where your risk is higher.

Watch the full video to find even more ways to support compliance at your call center.

How Your Dialer Software Can Support Compliance

Beyond best practices, Griffin said that technology can play a crucial role in supporting compliance. And for outbound sales and lead gen teams, that starts with having the right dialing software features. Among the features that Griffin detailed were:

• Dynamic Scripting.   Griffin said dynamic scripting is a must-have at call centers dialing across different states. Automatically give your reps the state-specific scripts they need to stay compliant—and make the right sales pitch.
• Tools and Strategies for Smarter Outreach.   Your dialer should have Call Count Settings that limit the number of times you call a single lead. It should also support omnichannel outreach. Utilizing text and email in tandem with dialing can help you lower your call count while still reaching customers effectively.
• Time of Day Call Restrictions.   According to Griffin, “Your technology should make it so you’re never calling outside the hours that you’re allowed to call.”
• Abandon Rate Settings.   This setting can help you strike a balance between a high call rate for agents and a low abandonment rate that meets compliance standards.

Be Proactive and Assume the Audit

Nima Hakimi summed things up by emphasizing the role of compliance for successful call centers. “You have to keep compliance at the heart of what you do. You need to be proactive and operate as if you’re going to get audited and there are going to be complaints. That’s the best advice I can give: Have the assumption that it’s going to happen, not IF it’s going to happen. If you can operate like that, you will be in a much better position.”

Discover how Convoso can help your call center navigate complex compliance issues and increase conversions for your sales and lead generation teams. Request a demo today to see our dialer in action. And stay up-to-date with the latest developments on the Convoso contact center blog.

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DISCLAIMER: The information on this page, and related links, is provided for general education purposes only and is not legal advice. Convoso does not guarantee the accuracy or appropriateness of this information to your situation. You are solely responsible for using Convoso’s services in a legally compliant way and should consult your legal counsel for compliance advice. Any quotes are solely the views of the quoted person and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Convoso.