A New Day for the TCPA?

If you field or sponsor phone-based research studies to gauge customer satisfaction, customer experience (CX), or voter sentiment in the US, you already know that complying with the Telephone Consumer Protections Act (TCPA) of 1993 impacts efficiency and effectiveness. Among the many components of the TCPA, the act states that “an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) cannot be used to call a mobile number unless express consent is provided. While the definition of “express consent” is pretty clear, other parts are more nebulous.

In spite of the absence of clear direction from the FCC, the industry has managed to adapt—albeit with increased cost for the operational shift. Call centers have added more list scrubbing services to identify cell phones so those numbers can be manually punched in using 10 keys on a Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) while putting land line numbers through a dialer to be as efficient as possible.

Over the years, the opinion industry has sought clarification from the FCC, especially on the definition of an ATDS (or “dialer”) and what constitutes “human intervention”. In the meantime, call centers interpreted their risk and responded as they saw fit.

Read more about recent TCPA happenings and cases