Pacific Bell Telephone Company

Pacific Bell Telephone Company (Pacific) urges the Commission to adopt an "acceptable" error rate similar to that recommended by the Direct Marketing Association - as close to 0% as possible but in no case exceeding 5% of answered calls per day in any campaign. Pacific states:

[F]or public policy reasons, the Commission should set a positive error rate. An error rate of zero would effectively deter companies from using [automatic dialing devices, or ADD] at all. In order to avoid penalties for violation of the "zero error rate," the ADD software would have to be reprogrammed so as to essentially never "overdial." Instead, organizations would be forced to monitor every call made, at significant cost to efficiency. Importantly, this efficiency is valuable not only to the organizations placing the calls, but to end-users as well. For example, Pacific Bell's credit and collections department uses ADD to contact customers who are at risk of losing their telephone service due to nonpayment of bills. It is important that Pacific contact these customers as quickly as possible, in order to alert them to the possibility of disconnection, give them adequate opportunity to arrange for payment, and avoid service interruption. Without ADD, Pacific would not be able to contact those customers as efficiently, and their service quality could suffer.

Pacific states that it tracks its call abandonment rates internally and finds that they are significantly below the 5% industry standard. Pacific urges the Commission to adopt a uniform reporting standard for abandoned calls, distinguishing between "live calls" and "all calls." Pacific explains that "live calls" are those that result in a person answering the call, whereas "all calls" include calls that result in busy signals, no answer, or answering machines. In Pacific's experience, only about 25-30% of calls placed by its predictive dialers are "live." Accordingly, Pacific recommends that the Commission track call abandonment in terms of "live calls."

Pacific agrees with the Commission's recommendations for maintenance of business records, and states that it currently tracks its abandoned call percentage for internal purposes on a monthly basis. Pacific's call abandonment data does not now include the level of detail proposed by the Commission, but Pacific states that it can program its tracking systems in approximately a month to capture the additional information.

In its reply comments, Pacific states that telemarketers have a built-in incentive to keep the number of abandoned calls placed by predictive dialers as close to zero as possible. It notes that telemarketers are in the sales industry, and a sale cannot be completed if a customer is not reached. Pacific's campaigns using predictive dialers "typically see abandoned call rates of one percent or less." (Pacific Reply, at 1.) According to Pacific, this low error rate demonstrates two key factors the Commission should consider: first, telemarketers will minimize error rates without Commission intervention, simply as a matter of good business practices; second, errors - no matter how small - will still occur, and it is unreasonable to penalize an individual or company that is not able to achieve absolute perfection.

Pacific supports the comments of AT&T on defining what would constitute an error rate. Pacific urges that the Commission clarify that an "error" for purposes of this rulemaking occurs when the predictive dialer hangs up on the person called because no agent is available to speak. Pacific does not believe that an "error" should include instances when the called party recognizes that it is a predictive dialer call and hangs up before the agent can get on the line. Similarly Pacific would not include calls that agents cancel prior to the time end-users answer.