FTC Battle Scars: Compliance Lessons Learned from a Call Center Expert

Call center compliance was at the heart of our panel with the PACE (Professional Association for Customer Engagement) virtual summit. The theme of this year’s annual conference, “Leveraging Change for Success,” focused on how businesses can navigate the complexities of a fluctuating compliance landscape.

During the panel, “FTC Battle Scars: Lessons Learned from a Call Center Expert,” Heather Griffin, call center consultant and Chief Revenue Officer at Dvinci Energy, shared her experience and lessons learned from an intensive FTC compliance investigation with a former call center. Bringing the panel discussion full circle to address how outbound call centers can stay ahead of compliance were Helen Mac Murray, Partner at Mac Murray & Shuster LLP, and Nima Hakimi, Convoso CEO and Co-founder.

The panelists’ discussion on call center compliance covered:

• A first-hand account of an FTC investigation

• Key takeaways from the experience

• Best practices for supporting outbound call center compliance

• Important features to have in your dialer software

Explore some of the panel highlights from the recap below, or watch the full video to hear even more about how you can take action to protect your business and support compliance.

A First-Hand Experience of FTC Action

FTC bust-ups of fraudulent activity regularly capture headlines. But it’s not just bad actors who get caught up in the agency’s dragnet.

“When you hear things like, ‘FTC Nabs a Robocaller,’ what you’re usually thinking about is someone committing fraud or taking money from senior citizens. You’re not thinking about a company like we were,” said Heather Griffin, who ran a call center in 2019 investigated by the FTC.

Our company had all intentions of being compliant. We were dialing opt-in data, we were being audited [by a] third-party, we were doing the things we thought we were supposed to be doing…We weren’t hiding from anything. Our clients were Fortune 100 companies. We thought we were doing the right thing.”

One day though, the company received a questionnaire from the FTC. “We, [in hindsight] maybe naively, just filled out the questions and sent them back,” Griffin recalled. But what seemed like a run-of-the-mill inquiry soon turned into an aggressive investigation.

“They quickly came in and started investigating fast. They were very forceful. There wasn’t a lot of negotiation that they were willing to discuss. They had convinced themselves that we were a bad actor.”

A Far-Reaching Investigation Leads to Stiff Penalties

Despite thinking they had done their due diligence on TCPA compliance, the investigators exposed vulnerabilities in the company’s compliance approach.

“The FTC was ruthless. At some point they exported all of our dial records without our knowledge and asked for an opt-in for every one of 14 million records…And this was before ActiveProspect and Jornaya. A lot of those data vendors [that we used years before] were gone.”

At the end of the investigation, the FTC handed down serious penalties. While they left the company open, the FTC’s stipulated order forced the owner to relinquish control of the company and his shares in it.

Key Takeaways from Experience with FTC

Despite the difficulty of the experience, Griffin came away with many valuable lessons to share with other companies.

Rely on an Expert

Griffin’s biggest takeaway was that, despite how well-prepared they thought they were, her company still needed an outside expert on their side. “Even with the best intentions, we made mistakes,” she said. “So what I learned from that process is that you really need an attorney, a third-party, or someone who is really an expert to look at your business and how it’s running.”

Mac Murray, who represented Griffin’s organization during the ordeal, echoed this. Maintaining compliance isn’t as simple as looking at a set of rules and taking action, she said.

“There were many things I had learned that came from interacting with regulators [over the course of my career]. And none of this information is in the statutes or rules, in any book, or on any website.” In short, there’s no substitute for experience.

And you need that experience on your side from the get-go.“The first thing I would have recommended that they do differently,” Mac Murray said, “would have been not to respond to that first inquiry. Because the FTC is so against everybody that they investigate, you have to start defending yourself with literally the first phone call.”