Canada
The only legislation/ ruling extant at a national level that we aware of is the following:
"In the Commission's view, parties using predictive dialers to place live voice calls to solicit should minimize the number of calls where an operator is not immediately available. The Commission encourages such callers to adopt any technical advances in predictive dialing that would assist in achieving this objective."
- Extracted from Section III/E/1 of Decision CRTC 94-10, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 13 June 1994.
The quote was in response to submissions made by the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA). When we last spoke to them, the CMA saw 2 - 3% as a reasonable level for abandoned calls. But this doesn't mean a lot unless the other dialing rules are addressed at the same time.
Some provinces may have applicable legislation or codes of practice.
US
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) in the US announced its guidelines for predictive dialers in January 1999. They were followed swiftly by the American Telemarketing Association (ATA) who came out with similar guidelines in March 1999, although they did not go quite as far as the DMA's. Our recommendation is that the DMA's are the ones to follow. They key provisions are as follows:
| Rule | US Guideline |
|---|---|
| Abandoned call delay | 'If a live operator is unavailable to take any call generated by the dialer, abandon the call and release the line after not more than two seconds.' |
| Predictive Hangups | 'Allow the predictive dialing system to ring at least four times or for 12 seconds before disconnecting' |
| Abandoned call limits | 'Abandoned calls should be kept as close to 0% as possible, and in no case should exceed 5% of answered calls per day in any campaign' |
| Calculation of abandoned call rate | See above. 'Answered calls' is the same as what we define as 'live calls'. |