Ofcom tackles silent calls

British regulator Ofcom has set out proposals to help prevent consumers being harassed by repeated silent calls, states Call Centre Helper.

Some 70% of the complaints Ofcom receives about silent calls are from consumers receiving two or more silent calls a day from the same company, often over a period of days or weeks.

The vast majority of these calls are caused by automated calling systems used by call centres to contact large numbers of people in one go. Sometimes the technology used to detect answer machines will mistake a live consumer for an answering machine and cut off the call without the person hearing anything, resulting in a silent call

Ofcom is proposing a new rule to prevent a company calling an answer phone more than once in any 24-hour period, unless a call centre agent is on hand to answer the call.

US-based company Sitel has received more than $1 million from the Australian government to create 200 new jobs, says The Mercury.

This came as Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed private investment in Tasmania had dropped by more than 40% over the past year. Sitel employs 150 Tasmanians at call centres in Devonport and Burnie.

The grant will allow Sitel, which employs 60 000 people worldwide, to train Tasmanian workers to provide telephone support to an offshore IT company.

The Conservative Party says its call centre played a key role in achieving record seat gains by communicating with voters right until the general election polls closed, according to CCF Online.

An interaction management system from Altitude was used to contact potential supporters, record voting intentions and drive the communications strategy by showing a real-time map of what seats could be won.

Jonathan Hazzlewood, operations manager of Geneva, which was responsible for the Conservative's call centre, said: “Not only did we make over a million calls in the run-up to the campaign and in the campaign itself, but the system performed faultlessly allowing us to continue calling electors up to 21:45 on election night.”