6 Questions to Ask Your Vendor about TCPA Compliance

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is changing the way companies dial, and with good reason considering that the number of TCPA cases has increased tenfold in the past decade according to WebRecon with 351 cases in 2010 to 3,267 in 2019.

During a recent webinar, we asked Paul Gipson, Director Marketing Compliance Services at CompliancePoint, for the questions companies need to ask their vendors about TCPA compliance. Read on for his take on what you need to ask your vendors about TCPA compliance.

If you’re in B2B sales and using a sales dialer as part of your sales outreach, do you know if that dialing technology is TCPA compliant? Remember that third parties acting on your behalf can create liability for your company due to "vicarious liability."

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TCPA Compliance Questions to Ask Your Software Vendor

1. How does your dialing company vendor comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? Are they aware of TCPA regulations and what are they doing to ensure their own compliance?
2. Do they have any sort of unbiased third-party opinion? This would be a company that has vetted them as a manual platform and not as an automated system, otherwise known as an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS)?
3. How do they manage opt outs? You’re asking this question to make sure they can honor Do not Call (DNC) requests in a timely manner.
4. How long do they keep your dialing records and who’s responsible for obtaining them? For example, if they keep the dialing records for 30 days, what happens on day 31? Are they deleting those records; are they putting them in a data warehouse that you can access later; or do you need to get those records on day 30? Remember that recordkeeping is everything when it comes to creating a defense, so make sure that you know what happens. If your dialing company is only keeping records of the calls or texts that you have placed for a certain period, make sure you're getting those records before they get deleted. And then also make sure in your contract that you've got some sort of transfer of those records if the relationship is terminated for any reason.
5. How does the dialing company determine the location of who you're calling? Is it based off the address of that business or the area code on that phone number? I'd recommend address because there’s a lot of cell phone mobility throughout the US. For example, someone could have a Georgia phone number but be in California. We’re not going want to call them at 8 a.m. Georgia time because we’d be waking them up at 5 a.m. California time.
6. What do they put on their caller ID? Is a name listed or is it only a phone number? If you want to display a name, most modern dialing solutions can display a name and we want to have them push that to the telecom carriers.

After you’ve asked your questions, ask your dialing company for a presentation or screen share of how they comply with TCPA compliance regulations. They should be able to do so in real-time, so it would be concerning if they weren’t able to do so.

Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to learn more about TCPA and our B2B dialing stack and multi-channel sales engagement software. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.