Last time I promised that I wouldn’t post again on Silent Calls. I promised that I’d change the record.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve changed my mind.

Firstly, because I’ve spent so much time on silent calls over the last few weeks that I haven’t had much of a chance to do anything else interesting. Secondly, because BBC breakfast went nuts about the story this morning.

I’m sure many of you spotted the story, and a couple of you may even have spotted that David Hickson was shown reading our Voluntary Code of Practice.

But unfortunately, this was the most exposure that the code got. This was a real pity.

Whether we can ever expect BBC breakfast to produce a story that supports industry is another discussion, but I wonder if BBC breakfast are really interested in helping stop silent calls at all. I get the impression they’d rather pretend they are and do nothing about it.

What do I mean? Well, lots of people involved in call centre management would have seen the piece yesterday. They may be thinking that they want to stop making silent calls, but don’t understand exactly how the informaton message should be used. They would have seen Robert from the DMA talking about their code being updated and will probably have concluded that they’ll wait until then before they do anything.

It’s unlikely that the DMA will update it’s code until Christmas at the earliest. This is because the DMA has strict rules in it’s constitution to ensure that any changes are fully considered.

The result is that many call centres are not going to think about making this change until after Christmas. That’s a lot more silent calls, and a lot more TPS registrations. This wouldn’t be the case if they knew about the Voluntary code.

I suppose you could put it down to the BBC not knowing about the code, or not understanding why it should have been mentioned. This would be true, except for the fact that I had a telephone conversation with the reporter just before they filmed the piece and explained all this to him.

If the BBC don’t really want to help, perhaps they should change the record.

Regards,
DB