Engineering
guidance for responding to customer concerns about the California Public
Utilities Commission’s recent
Order Instituting Rulemaking on the
Commission’s Own Motion to Establish an Appropriate Error Rate for Connections Made
by an Automatic Dialing Device Pursuant to Section 2875.5 of the Public
Utilities Code
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Authorization |
Name |
Initials |
Date |
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Current
Issuer |
Paul
V. Roby |
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Technical
Manager |
Mikki
L. Leach |
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Technical
Manager |
David J. Votava |
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Technical
Manager |
James
Hedges |
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Technical
Manager |
J.
Daniel Mason |
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Revision
history
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Issue |
Date |
Description |
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June 28,
2002 |
Baseline |
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2.0 |
July 1, 2002 |
Revision incorporating recommendations
of Avaya Corporate Counsel |
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Introduction
On June 27, 2002, the California Public Utilities Commission
(PUC) voted to adopt a draft order that institutes rules governing predictive
dialing in California.[1] This document is designed to summarize
certain basic information about the draft order for you and to inform customers
of Avaya’s participation in the public comment process in California. This
document does not contain all of the information contained in the draft order,
and reference is made to the draft order for a complete description of its
terms. This document is not legal
advice, and customers are advised to obtain the advice of competent legal
counsel in determining their own best course of action.
Until the final rule is published, we may only rely on the draft, the comments submitted on it, and the reply comments. The information below is based on the draft released by the PUC on June 27, 2002. We undertake no obligation to revise or update the information contained in this document.
Summary of the proposed rules
1. Beginning July 1, 2002, callers using automated dialing equipment to call people in California must maintain records of:
· the number of connected calls, which are calls to California numbers answered by live persons; and
· the number of abandoned calls, which are calls to California numbers answered by live persons where either:
- the dialer disconnects the call after the called party has answered, or
- the called party does not receive a response from an agent within two seconds of the called party completing his or her greeting[2].
In each case, the numbers must be summarized monthly and the records must be maintained for at least three years.
2. Beginning July 1, 2002, abandoned calls effectively will be prohibited in California. Each such call, as defined above, will be considered an error, and the generators of such calls will be subject to penalties if abandoned calls are placed at more than an allowed maximum error rate.
3. Beginning July 1, 2002, the allowed maximum error rate, defined as abandoned calls divided by connected calls, measured monthly, will be 3%.
4. Beginning January 1, 2003, the allowed maximum error rate will drop to 1%.
5.
The draft rules, and the Public Utilities Code section
they implement, are somewhat ambiguous on the point of whether or not the new
rules apply to calls made when a business relationship already exists between
the caller and the called party. For
example, there is:
·
information
suggesting that the rules scope does not include an exemption for
dialers used in servicing pre-existing business relationships (including
customer service and financial collections):
- The California Public
Utilities Code, Chapter 10, Article 1, Section 2875.5, which deals with
automated dialing devices, explicitly defines the scope of its abandoned call
prohibition to be “any automatic equipment that incorporates a storage
capability of telephone numbers to be called or a random or sequential number
generator capable of producing numbers to be called.”
-
- The
Interim Order section of the draft rules does not contain any exemption
similar to that exemption granted from the rules for automatic dialing and
announcing devices (ADADs) in subpart (f) of Section 2872 of the Code.[3] These exemptions are explicit in referring
to ADADs, which by definition clearly differ from automated dialing devices as
defined in § 2875.5.
·
information
suggesting that the rules scope does exempt dialers used in servicing
pre-existing business relationships (including customer service and financial
collections):
- The Conclusions of Law
section of the draft rules, item number 2, states that “the rules adopted in
this proceeding are not applicable to automatic dialing-announcing devices … or
to exempted calls defined in Pub. Util. Code § 2872.”
- At the time the rules were introduced for
a vote at the June 27, 2002 PUC meeting, Commissioner Brown, author of the
draft rules, said words to the effect that he did not intend the rules to apply
to calls exempted from the ADAD regulations in § 2872.
Faced with the foregoing, customers should rely on advice of their own legal counsel about whether the rules apply to their customer service or collections calls. Hopefully, the PUC will clarify this issue in the near future.
What the proposed rules do not say
The rules do not include any requirement that calls not connected to an agent within two seconds of the called party’s greeting be disconnected, or otherwise handled in any special way. Presumably, it will be up to the customer whether such calls are queued or dropped.
The rules do not include any requirement governing precisely how dialers must determine that a call has been “answered by a live person.” Similarly, they do not specify a precise definition of “completing the called party’s greeting.”
The rules do require the PUC to convene an industry workshop, to consider and make recommendations to the PUC on, among other things, record-keeping methods and the feasibility of accomplishing a 1% error rate by January 1, 2003. The results of this workshop could significantly affect the ability of Avaya customers to comply with the final rules, and the productivity costs that may be associated with compliance.
What Avaya is doing about this
Avaya representatives have followed the progress of the California PUC rulemaking process. On May 23, 2002, we sent comments to the Public Utilities Commission, advocating changes to the proposed start time for the “two second clock” that defined an “abandoned call.” Originally, the PUC proposed starting the clock with the telephone going off hook at the called party end. We considered that standard unworkable for our customers, because of the difficulty involved in measuring it and because any call could be forced into violation if the called party’s greeting took more than two seconds from when they lifted the receiver.
In addition to the above, Avaya expects to take an active part in workshops on measurement issues and currently intends to make every effort to help the PUC come up with rules that accomplish the purpose of the law without imposing unnecessary burdens on our dialer customers.
Achieving compliance
Customers seeking to comply with the proposed California regulations must balance considerations of abandoned call avoidance with considerations of agent productivity. Exactly which approach and dialer settings to use is a decision each customer must make for itself. Precise recordkeeping requirements are yet to be defined by the PUC, though the draft rules require “summary records tracking connected calls and abandoned calls.” The advice of legal counsel is recommended.
To aid customers in making choices of dialer settings, Avaya suggests considering some of the following measures:
Calling lists should be divided, with calls into California specially handled in a separate job, so that dialer performance on calls with less stringent abandon rate needs will not be interfered with.
Safest approach
To avoid any connections without agents being available, dialers may use the managed dialing feature of the Avaya PDS. With managed dialing, no call attempt is ever launched without an agent being connected in advance. As a result, under the new California PUC rules, there should never be an “abandoned call,” except in the case of an equipment or telephone network failure, or when an agent prematurely terminates a call.
To minimize the impact of managed dialing on agent performance and idle time, managed dialing jobs may be configured with a preview time limit of zero seconds, and without allowing agents to cancel calls. Still, because agents will listen to each call attempt (including busy signals, no answers, answering machines, etc.), there will be a considerable reduction in raw agent productivity (as the percentage of their time spent talking to live contacts) as compared to predictive dialing.
When using managed dialing, it is important to consider the proposed record-keeping requirement that call attempts be classified as “live voice connect” or “other” (busy, answering machine, etc.), so that summary information on the number of live voice connects may be made available to the PUC. Agent-set completion codes should be configured to allow reports to distinguish live connects from “other” categories of call attempt outcomes.
More efficient approach
If agent productivity considerations mandate a more aggressive dialing approach than managed dialing, customers may wish to consider using predictive dialing, with careful attention to abandon rates.
Jobs should be configured with their wait queue limit value set to at least three seconds, to avoid disconnecting a call that might have not overstayed the (allowable, depending on exactly how California decides certain measurement issues) two second limit in queue.
Consider starting with an expert calling ratio value that is very low (even zero), so that
the dialer is minimally aggressive in predicting when an agent will become
available. Track the abandoned call
rate statistics daily, and carefully increase the expert calling ratio to a level that maximizes agent utilization
while keeping the abandon rate within the allowed limit.
For tracking the number of calls connected to live persons and number of abandoned calls, use the PC Analysis feature of the PDS. The most relevant data are found in the Transaction Statistics File. Use the following procedure to obtain the numbers required by the proposed PUC rules.
1. Use a phone strategy that includes a detection mode which passes only live voice calls to agents. Do not set the detection mode to pass autovoice, or any other type of call response to agents. This forces the system to use answering machine detection, and means that any call which spent time in an outbound queue was a live voice.
2.
For each call attempt,
IF
-
the TRN_TRANSTYPE field of the Transaction Statistics
File record is equal to “O,” (the capital letter, not the digit for zero)
(indicating an outbound, not inbound, call)
AND
- the TRN _COMPCODE field of the Transaction Statistics File record equals
· 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, or 93 (agent releases) OR
· 46 (called party hung up in queue) OR
· 48 (system hung up on called party in queue)
(end of TRN_COMPCODE values to check for)
THEN the call was an outbound call, connected to a live voice. Count the call as “connected to a live person.”
3. For each call counted as “outbound call connected to a live person,” examine the TRN_WAITTIME field of the Transaction Statistics File record. If the value stored in this field is greater than 2, the call spent more than two seconds after being classified before it was either connected to an agent or disconnected. Count the call as an abandoned call.
4. To calculate the abandoned call (“error”) rate, divide the count of abandoned calls by the count of calls connected to a live person. Multiply by 100 to make the result a percentage.
Calculate the cumulative
abandoned call rate for the month on a regular basis. Remember, the abandoned call rate is measured monthly. If abandon rates are running too high in the
early part of any given month, less aggressive dialing in the later part of the
month may allow the final totals for the month to be within the allowable
limit.
Risk considerations with the more efficient approach
The approach outlined above depends on assumptions about measurement methods that appear reasonable to Avaya, but may or may not be in compliance with whatever measurement standards the California PUC finally sets. Customers are advised to consult with their own attorneys and to consider their own risk tolerance to guide them in choosing among the “safest,” “more efficient,” and any other relevant approaches.
Risks with any approach
With any approach to dialing, even managed dialing, it is possible that errors will occur. If local network factors, problems with agent behaviors, or other conditions local to the calling center prevent agents from responding within two seconds of a called party’s greeting--even if an agent was available at the time of the call--violations may occur. Calling center managers should consider running tests to verify that their system is in compliance with whatever rules the PUC comes up with.
Take an active part in the process
Regulation is a constantly shifting landscape. Avaya customers should join Avaya in monitoring developments in all of the jurisdictions into which they dial. Customers may also wish to consider joining the American Teleservices Association (ATA). The ATA is an advocacy organization that works vigorously to ensure that the concerns of dialer users are considered in the public lawmaking and rulemaking processes.[4] The ATA can help customers be aware of new political process threats to predictive dialing, and help with ways of taking part in the public policy dialogue with legislators and regulatory agencies.