By Peter Farmer
Everyone at Simwood is very clear on the nuances of our policy towards diallers, having suffered me droning on about compliance issues at them in training sessions, or faced the wrath of Simon or worse, Charles.
Publicly, we usually refer to “illegitimate robodiallers” with a soupçon of the pejorative to boot. We’ve talked a lot qualitatively about what we mean, but never quantitatively.
And there’s the rub – we have no quantitative metric about what sort of dialler we allow on our network. As Simon said in a recent blog, we look at intent , and, while the engineers in our customer base would prefer a target set of metrics, we firmly believe that’s not the right thing to do.
Picture a federation of hospitals. Or clinics. Or hotels. Or hair salons. Or restaurants. This group pools their resources and creates a shared service centre, or outsources to a budding entrepreneur. Every day, they call out to confirm their next day’s appointments.
Now picture a spiv engaged in the scrotitude of pretending to be Microsoft and conning little old ladies into thinking they have a virus on their computer.
I promise this is the last part of the thought exercise…. Imagine what the Answer Seizure Ratio, Average Call Duration, Concurrent Call Attempts Per Second etc are for both those scenarios. Neither is great from a pure quantitative perspective, but one is useful (even essential for society when it comes to ensuring the efficient use of scarce medical resources), one is abhorrent.
This is why we talk about intent, and qualitatively about diallers. For that entrepreneur that runs a legitimate call centre, for legitimate reasons, fully licensed and above board, we’ll go to bat for them every day of the week. In fact we do, as there’s some financial institutions on our network whose bona fide outbound calls don’t neatly tick some box on a clipboard somewhere. Confidentiality clauses prevent us from giving the full details, but these legitimate use cases, of importance to society, aren’t quantitatively great..
If you are in that arena, and are fed up of shopping around to find someone that will listen, or fed up with having to package up your traffic so those metrics are diluted to the point a computer says “yes,” then we might be the network for you – either way, there’s no harm in having a conversation to see if we can help.
Of course, if you call us and it turns out you’re conning people into paying duties and taxes for a non-existent UPS package, or parroting a well rehearsed set of metrics to obfuscate some underlying spivvery, I can tell you now what the ACD of that call will be.
