compliance

The Do Not Call Rules an Outbound Team Has To Know

The national registry is the famous part and the smallest. Internal lists, call hours, disclosures and records are where most violations actually happen.

Outbound calling in the United States sits under two regimes at once. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule at 16 CFR part 310, and the FCC's rules implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act at 47 CFR 64.1200.

They overlap heavily and they are not identical. A programme compliant with one is not automatically compliant with the other, and states layer their own requirements on top of both.

The registry is the smallest part

Everybody knows about the national Do Not Call registry. Three things about it are less widely known and matter more.

Access is a subscription, not a download. Numbers are added continuously, and a scrub against a file from six months ago is not a scrub. The obligation is ongoing.

The established business relationship exception has a clock. Calls to a consumer with whom you have an existing relationship are treated differently, and the permitted period is defined and finite, running from the transaction or the inquiry. It is not indefinite, and "they were a customer once" is not a standing permission.

An inquiry is not the same as a purchase, and the two carry different periods.

The internal list is where violations happen

Separately from the national registry, a seller must maintain its own do-not-call list and honour requests not to be called again.

This is the obligation that gets missed, because it requires a working process rather than a vendor subscription. A person who says "take me off your list" on a call has made a request that must be recorded and must be effective across the business, not only in the campaign that generated the call.

Three ways teams fail it. The request is recorded in the dialler but not the CRM, so the next campaign built from the CRM calls them again. The request is recorded against one number and the person has two. Or the request is honoured by the rep who took it and never written down at all.

Each of those produces a second call to somebody who explicitly asked not to receive one, which is both the clearest violation available and the one most likely to be reported.

Hours, disclosures and the opening seconds

Hours. Calls to a residence are restricted to between 8am and 9pm at the called party's local time. Local to them. Several states are stricter and some restrict Sundays or holidays.

Prompt disclosure. The rule requires certain information promptly at the start of a call: the identity of the seller, that the purpose is a sale, and the nature of what is being sold. "Promptly" means at the start, not after qualifying.

Caller identification. Transmitting accurate caller identification information is required, and the practice of rotating through numbers that do not identify the caller runs directly against it.

The FTC's guide to complying with the Telemarketing Sales Rule sets these out in plainer language than the rule itself.

Abandoned calls

A predictive dialler that connects more calls than it has agents for produces abandoned calls, where the consumer answers and nobody is there.

The rule limits the permitted rate of abandonment and requires a prompt recorded message identifying the seller when a call is abandoned, rather than silence. It also requires the call to ring for a minimum period before being treated as unanswered.

The measurement window and the calculation are specified, which means this is an auditable number rather than an impression. A dialler that cannot report its abandonment rate against the rule's definition is a dialler that cannot demonstrate compliance.

Records

The rule requires records to be kept, including of the advertising and promotional material used, the sales records, the employee records, and the verifiable authorisations where relevant.

The practical version for a small outbound team: keep the scripts you used and when, keep the call records with dates and outcomes, and keep every do-not-call request with the date and the number it applied to.

None of that is burdensome if it is a by-product of the system. All of it is impossible to reconstruct later.

Texts are calls

A text message to a mobile is treated as a call under the TCPA framework, which means the consent analysis applies to the text leg of any cadence. Prior express written consent is the standard for marketing messages, and it has defined elements: a clear and conspicuous disclosure, agreement not conditioned on purchase, and a record of it.

The practical consequence for a sequence tool is that consent has to be a structured field with a date and a source, readable by a condition in the sequence, so that "only send the text leg where written consent is recorded" is something the system enforces rather than something a person remembers.

The one-page policy

Every outbound team should have a written answer to six questions, and most do not.

When was the registry last scrubbed and how often does it happen. Where do internal do-not-call requests get recorded and what reads that record. What hours may we call, in the recipient's time zone. What do we say in the first ten seconds. What is our abandonment rate. Where are the call records and for how long.

If any answer is "I would have to ask", that is the one to fix this week.