DirecTV’s FTC Debacle Could Have Been Avoided
Last week the Federal Trade Commission fined DirecTV for violating the Do Not Call provisions of its Teleservices Sales Rule. The digital television service provider will pay a record $5.35 million for something that could simply have been avoided.
The complaint alleges that telemarketers calling on behalf of DirecTV contacted consumers on the National Do Not Call Registry. In addition, the complaint alleges that one of the telemarketers – Global Satellite, directly or through another entity – abandoned calls to consumers by failing to put a live sales representative on the line within two seconds after the contacted consumer completes his or her greeting, as required under the law.
Not only is DirecTV responsible for the legal actions of telemarketers it outsources work to, but it had plenty of warning that changes were being made to the Teleservices Sales Rule. The Do Not Call Registry went into effect on Oct. 1, 2003, and trade publications such as “Direct” (a sister publication of CHIEF MARKETER) and “Customer Interaction Solutions” kept contact centers in the loop of pending changes for about nine months.
“It’s incomprehensible, after the extensive media coverage leading up to the now well established Teleservices Sales Rule, that any large business-to-consumer company would commit errors of that nature,” says Tracey E, Schelmetic, editorial director of Norwalk, CT-based “Customer Interaction Solutions.” “The FTC had a slow start in enforcing the fines related to violations of both the Teleservices Sales Rule’s Do-Not-Call list provision and its call-abandonment rules, which may have provided some b-to-c companies with a false sense of confidence. Certainly that will no longer be the case after the DirecTV settlement.”
Pat Kachura, the Direct Marketing Association’s senior vice president, ethics and consumer affairs, points out that Do Not Call regulations have not regularly been violated. But when they are, it paints a bad picture of marketing.
“Playing by the rules means obeying both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Kachura said in a statement. “Those few companies that do not respect consumers’ wishes reflect badly on the image of the industry as a whole.”
Carol Meyers, vice president of marketing for marketing management solutions provider Unica, says marketers need to be careful when selecting a company to handle its telemarketing needs. A prospective service provider has to be able to articulate that it knows the telemarketing laws and intends to follow them.
“You want to know how they are incorporating that list,” Meyers says. “A great solution is for your organization to approve or supply the lists to the telemarketing firm you are working with. If a person says, ‘Take me off your list,’ they’re supposed to do that, and they should report that to the company as well.”
