By Angela Garfinkel, President and Founder of Quality Contact Solutions
The 2016 PACE TCPA Summit was business as usual for most of the 300+ attendees. Special guest speakers included Mark Stone from the Federal Communications Commission, Lois Greisman from the Federal Trade Commission and Tucker Carlson, Fox News Co-Host. In addition, a host of legal experts and compliance consultants shared their viewpoints on how to best protect and defend against a TCPA class action lawsuit. “How to place telemarketing calls to wireless phone numbers (legally)” is still the number one issue facing the outbound telemarketing industry. And the answer isn’t that simple. If you have prior express written consent, there is still two large issues: “Revocation of Consent” and “Reassigned phone numbers”. If you don’t have prior express written consent, you can place telemarketing calls if you use the correct technology – a non-Automated Telephone Dialing System (non-ATDS). But what is a non-ATDS? Even experts don’t agree.
Quality Contact Solutions is deeply involved in helping our clients conduct outbound telemarketing programs in a compliant manner. We have two Customer Engagement Compliance Experts (CECP) on staff and one SRO auditor.
Quality Voice & Data launched a new product at the 2016 PACE TCPA Summit, “The Compliance Phone”. Backed by a 288 page Non-ATDS legal opinion letter, The Compliance Phone was created to give customers an easy to implement solution for placing telemarketing calls to wireless phone numbers. The Compliance Phone is geared towards large organizations with disparate locations staffed with smaller numbers of people that use the telephone to make outbound contacts. Most office phone systems would fall under the definition of an ATDS. The Compliance Phone gives corporations confidence to allow their frontline teams to place calls, even to wireless numbers without prior express written consent.
Dean Garfinkel, Quality Contact Solutions’ principal and Chief Operating Officer, hosted a fireside chat with the new Local Number Portability (LNP) administrator, iConnectiv. iConnectiv’s Chief Technology Offier, Chris Drake shared his thoughts on the topics and trends in the telemarketing industry. In addition, Drake also discussed the move of the Number Portability Administration Center to iConnectiv and provided insights on the expected timeline and what to expect.
In summary, we didn’t have any “aha” moments while at the DC Summit, but the FCC and FTC reminded us that they hate telemarketing and don’t really see a significant difference between legitimate telemarketing and the illegal spam robocallers. (My words, not theirs.)
Angela Garfinkel is the President and Founder of Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing services organization with a telemanagement model. Angela has the pleasure of leading a talented team that runs thousands of outbound telemarketing program hours on a daily basis. Angela can be reached at angela.garfinkel@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516.656.5118.
