 | The ICO Responds, and Darryl asks for help |
On 13th July I told you that I’d got in contact with the Information Commissioners Office about No Agent Available Calls.
The specific question put to the ICO was a follows:
“In principle, is it legal for an organisation, which was making a marketing call, to play a called individual a recorded message which is not a marketing message?
“It is not clear from reading the regulations that this is acceptable, as the initial purpose of the telephone call was for marketing purposes even though the resultant message was not.”
The response received:
“Regulation 19 relates to automated calls, i.e where “non live” direct marketing communications are transmitted following an automatically initiated sequence of calls. The situation you describe refers to non live communications automatically transmitted, which are not direct marketing in nature. As such regulation 19 would not apply.
“I appreciate your comments that the purpose of the call would be to facilitate a live direct marketing communication (regulation 21), but as no direct marketing material is actually communicated the call would not fall under the regulations, and therefore not under the ICO’s remit.”
Therefore, as long as the message that is played is carefully worded to ensure that it contains no marketing information, organisations need not be worried about using the NAA message.
It’s now time for us all to start doing this - although I appreciate that understanding what can and can’t be done is a little daunting for many call centres. For this reason I’ve has started to put together a code of practice for removing silent calls from your organisation. This can be found here.