You’ve just pulled dinner out of the oven, the kids have been wrangled to the table, and you’re just about to sit down.
Suddenly, your miracle of domestic logistics is shattered by the klaxon of your phone ringing. Juggling a hot plate of roast chicken and a small, wriggling child, you grab for the handset… only to be greeted by the forced enthusiasm of a long-suffering call centre worker who desperately wants you to tell you about simply fantastic savings on energy prices.
The Do Not Call Register has been in place since 2006. The DNCR Register allows Australians to place their phone number on a register indicating that they don’t wish to receive marketing calls or faxes, with fines applying for non-compliance.
The ACMA enables to organisations that want to conduct telemarketing campaigns subscribe to the Register and ‘wash’ their calls lists against it. This helps organisation make sure they aren’t calling people who don’t want to hear from them.
Of course, that doesn’t help if you don’t bother to check the Register in the first place, like Lead My Way. Lead My Way received a record civil penalty of $285,600 today for making marketing calls to numbers on the DNCR Register. Lead My Way had actually subscribed to the DNCR Register, but for some reason hadn’t washed their call list against it. This led to numerous complaints to the ACMA, which commenced an investigation.
Lead My Way was calling people to test their interest in its clients’ products or services, then on selling that information as ‘leads’ – that is, as prospective customers. This kind of business model can also raise significant Privacy Act compliance issues. Do the people being called understand that their personal information is collected and will be sold? How are they notified of the collection (APP 5)? Have they consented to that use? Is that consent informed and valid? Is the sale of their personal information permissible (APP 6)? Are they able to opt out of receiving further marketing calls, and are those opt outs being respected (APP 7)?
Cutting corners on how you manage and use personal information may save you time and money in the short term. But, as Lead My Way discovered, in the long run it can create massive compliance risk, annoy your end users, and incur the wrath of the regulators. Were the (likely minuscule) savings of ignoring the DNCR Register worth a regulator investigation and the comprehensive trashing of Lead My Way’s brand?
Perhaps we should call them and ask.
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