Mobile Strategies: Staying Productive While Staying Compliant 1

According to a Pew Research Center study, 90 percent of Americans own a cell phone. Add to that the data point, from the CDC, that 41 percent of U.S. households are “mobile only” – meaning the household is not subscribed to a landline at all.

Consumers – and we’re all consumers, in a sense – rely on mobile phones for a variety of reasons, and increas-ingly want and expect to be able to be reached wher-ever they are.

Mostly.

Mobile consumers also have expecta-tions of protection from a variety of calls, codified in the Telephone Consum-er Protection Act. Its original intent was to restrict the number of unsolicited telemarketing calls consumers received. It has since become a complicated piece of legislation for the accounts receivable man-agement industry – specifically collection agencies, who are using many of the same technologies, legislated by the TCPA.

Recent legislative rulings on the TCPA have highlighted the industry’s need for mobile strategies that assure compliance. Agencies who feel like contacting consum-ers via their mobile phones is now a closed door might be leaving money on the table, and not serving their clients to the best of

their ability, while agencies ignoring strategy entirely – especially in

light of the new ruling – are putting their reputation

and livelihood at risk.

For those seeking a deeper dive, we recommend viewing DialConnection’s presentation, Mobile Strategies in the Ever-Chang-

ing World of Com-pliance, a webinar

featuring the expertise of DialConnection’s own

Michael Vesper, as well as Hogan Lovells attorney Mark W.

Brennan, speaking on regulatory top-ics, and Peter Ghiselli of TransUnion, who discusses mobile contact strategies based on recent rulings and existing laws.

Mobile Strategies:Staying Productive While Staying Compliant

64% of American adults own a smartphone

41% of American households are “mobile-only”

90% of American adults own a cell phone

Mobile Strategies: Staying Productive While Staying Compliant 2

Mobile strategies should not simply be driven by regulations, but by the

changing technology and consumer behavior as well.

Best Practices for Wireless Numbers

Line type identification – Organizations today use data providers to identify the current line-type of phone numbers in their in-

ventory. This is key. Knowing what numbers in any given portfolio are mobile numbers is the first step in what separates your company from running afoul of the TCPA. As the technology has developed, insights have become more complete. The breadth and depth of mobile insights has grown expo-nentially and the data points associated with a profile have grown as well. Line-type iden-tification won’t just protect your operation from from unwanted regulatory scrutiny; it can inform your collection strategies as well.

Time of day for outbound attempts – Simply iden-tifying cellular numbers isn’t enough, however. Cell phones travel with the con-

sumer. We see many organizations that have developed address and area code mismatch processes that identify exceptions to ex-clude from campaigns to manage risk. Some organizations choose to only dial cellular numbers between 8am PST and 9PM EST to ensure that all U.S. time zones are open. You should be analyzing mobile RPC rates by hour to determine what is appropriate for your organization.

Attempt counters to wireless numbers – Be mindful of how much effort is being applied to cellular numbers over the

collections lifecycle. Manually dialing mobile numbers is a very expensive endeavor. Establishing business rules in your strategy for the frequency of attempts and the maximum number of attempts can help maximize the efficiency of salaries assigned to manual dialing. The business rules seem to vary widely; some organizations build strategy for monthly or every-other-month attempt frequency, others build strategy for daily, every other day or weekly penetration of mobile inventory.

Identifying wrong parties – In our current age of com-pliance, every organization is more sensitive than ever to wrong party contacts and

the number of phones in these bad phone databases is growing at a rapid rate. Many organizations are making efforts to identify good points of contact in their databases of bad phones and reactivate them. Even more

progressive, some organizations are thinking of creative ways to proactively manage their risk in real time by creating processes and tools that empower an agent to make smart-er decisions at the conclusion of a call.

Mobile Strategies: Staying Productive While Staying Compliant 3

Conclusion

YourOrganization

YourClients

YourTechnologyProviders

Our hope is that these best practices detailed in this whitepaper will help spur creative dis-cussions within your organizations, with your clients, and with your technology providers. It’s helpful to think of a triangle, and for any of the arms to function well, it needs a solid base: You and your clients need solid, compliant technology providers. Technology providers, in this era of shared liability, need agencies, who are serving their clients with compliance as a key guide. And clients need to be able to trust that you and your vendors are in synch.

Compliance presents challenges, certainly; but compliance also points the way to better con-tacts and more dollars collected – rather than spent on lawsuits – at the end of the day.

About DialConnection

DialConnection is a leading provider of contact center software solutions and services for the collections, financial services, government, healthcare, investment banking, telemarketing and utilities industries. Drawing on many years of industry expertise, DialConnection develops both cloud and on-premise solutions that effectively drive contact center performance. With flagship platforms initiating millions of global customer interactions each day, DialConnection is able to maximize the value of every customer interaction.

For more information regarding our solutions, please call 888-770-7706 or email info@dialconnection.com.