Lead Aggregators tout Litigator Scrub as vital for TCPA Compliance. Solving the problem of unknowingly contacting previous professional consumer litigants. The ones causing up to 20% of class action lawsuits under the ordinance. The ones fueling a 45% jump in Do Not Call and TCPA suits this year. The ones setting traps to get on lead broker and aggregator lists you may be purchasing for your call center.
Leads changing hands. And changing hands again. Slipping through the system never to be identified. Predatory prosecutors tearing apart supposedly TCPA compliant predictive dialer leads in court. Critical source, date, prospect callback intention information lost or misplaced. Audio recordings erased. It happens alot: "Show me what I filled out, when, where, and prove it." Try handing that needle-in-a-haystack request to your IT director or lead generator. This is what drives Telephone Consumer Protection Act Defense Attorneys nuts.
"My lead broker handles all that compliance stuff, so I'm good."
Too many trusting phone marketers have ended up in court thinking Do Not Call and TCPA chores were handled by their brokers, vendors, or IT department. Last year, 100% of lawyers attending the Compliance Summit in Washington D.C. were actively involved in lead procurement cases. And companies supplying TCPA lead technology solutions average upwards of two challenges a week from probing attorneys.
A cursory search under “TCPA Compliance Solutions” reveals that lawyer’s opinions are front and center. Connect First, for example, a top call center/ fulfillment house, hired my friend, Nick Whisler, from MacMurray, Peterson & Schuster to endorse their solutions page: “Connect First has taken significant steps to ensure the TCPA Safe Mode Solution is entirely segregated from equipment that is capable of auto-dialing telephone numbers. Calls made by customers using the TCPA Safe Mode Solution are not made using a different “mode” on a predictive dialer; rather, they are made by entirely different equipment."
Many list brokers, lead providers and data suppliers on the internet claim to have the new TCPA Laws safely handled for their clients. What you need to know, how to do it, and be protected. Some of the advice seems a little ahh farfetched - and downright impractical. Many TCPA Lawyers are even confused, as they spar over the October 16th, 2013 TCPA cell updates on our Webinars. And now, after the FCC Declaratory Ruling in June, the consumer has even more call prohibition rights. The kind that can put you out of business if you aren't paying attention.
As a list broker, if you do nothing with compliance, there's a good chance it’ll come back to bite you today. If you help your clients with TCPA compliance, that implies liability exposure. Not good. The days of making businesses sign off on the DNC and TCPA are kind of over. Without any guidance, either they’ll get a threat letter from a professional litigator demanding payment or the CFPB will find out they don’t even identify cells, and will want to do an audit. Your client expects some call prohibition help today. At the very least, some warm and fuzzy direction.
Dialers, hosted dialers, and fulfillment houses have come a long way since the early days of Do-Not-Call Compliance. Rarely do you hear anymore, “Compliance? We’ve never had a problem before. Don’t worry about it. It’s a free Country, call where you want!” – like in the early days.
Still, dialer DNC / TCPA solutions vary wildly. From completely home grown internal solutions– to certified integration with a top DNC Compliance service provider.
