Regulation Hub Update - July & August 2021
18 Aug 2021
This article is written by Steve Sullivan, the Deputy Chair of the Contact Centre Council.
The DMA Contact Centre Council doesn’t meet in August, so this is a ‘summer special’ issue of the council’s Regulation Hub Update covering two months’ worth of regulation and compliance news.
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Lloyds fined £90m for misleading communications
The FCA has fined Lloyds £90m for breaking the rules over "failures of communication" from 2009 to 2017. Over that period of time, over a million home insurance customers received renewal letters which made false claims. They were all told that they were being offered a "competitive price" when the renewal prices were typically nothing of the sort.
Furthermore, 500,000 customers were told they would receive a discount based on their loyalty or because they were a valued customer, but the discount was never applied and was never intended to be applied.
Most of us don't work in financial services, but the types of scrutiny and regulation applied to firms like Lloyds by the FCA are often adopted more widely over time outside of the sector.
So, are you claiming to offer customers competitive pricing or discounts without genuinely doing so? If so, watch out. And how often do you review the standard comms which appear on letters, emails, scripts, FAQs and in online journeys?
The ICO really is on a roll! There have been another 6 fines for firms and charities breaking the data protection rules since June’s Update – 5 of them for marketing failings.
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The ICO rarely fines charities, preferring to provide advice and guidance. However, Global One - a development charity – has been fined £10,000 after being found guilty of sending over half a million fundraising SMS messages without consent. Global One seems to have been guilty of naivety more than anything else. It accepted the advice of an - unnamed - fundraising agency which assured Global One that it was acting appropriately and that its 3rd party data could be used for fundraising.
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Papa John's has been fined a surprisingly low £10,000 after sending over 168,000 'nuisance' SMS marketing messages without consent. Papa John's had a valid reliance on the 'soft opt-in' to use the mobile numbers of customers who had previously ordered online, but it mistakenly applied the same treatment to the numbers of customers who had phoned in their orders. These customers wouldn't have had explained the possibility of future marketing communications or given the opportunity to opt out. |
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Colour Coat has been fined £130,000 for making over 400,000 illegal calls to TPS-registered numbers promoting its home improvement products. Colour Coat hid behind a variety of trading names and identities and used 15 separate mobile CLIs (caller line identification numbers) to help avoid detection. |
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Brazier is a claims management firm which brazenly made 11 million outbound ‘cold’ calls to consumers months after an amendment to the PECR rules made it illegal to do so. Brazier has been fined £200,000. |
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The fifth fine for the period is the only one that wasn’t related to direct marketing and imposed under the PECR regulations. Mermaids, a small charity which helps gender-diverse children, young people and their families, has been fined £25,000 for a data breach. Mermaids’ insecure email system meant that from 2016 to 2019 thousands of emails containing highly personal information about young people were accessible online. |
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Finally, a provider of call blocking devices, Yes Consumer Solutions, has been fined £170,000 for breaching the PECR rules. In an act of pure chutzpah, Yes made over 188,000 illegal calls to consumers whose phone numbers were registered with the TPS in order to sell them a solution to the problem of nuisance calls! |
You can read more about all these cases on the ICO’s website.
Ofcom Supports Scams Awareness Fortnight
In June Ofcom supported Citizen Advice’s Scams Awareness Fortnight.
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TCS fined £750,000
TCS, which ran ‘Discount Me Direct’ an offers and competitions text alert service, has been fined £750,000 for a series of failings which resulted in customers unknowingly signing up and paying for the service. The final fine figure was slightly reduced from the original one proposed in the light of mitigating arguments from TCS.
Ofwat has highlighted research showing the deteriorating position of water customers with mental health vulnerabilities through the pandemic. Amongst other changes, doing more to help customers communicate through a channel of their choice is likely to require adjustments in water companies’ contact centre operations and customer engagement approaches.
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After quite a long time without an energy supplier failing, HubEnergy – a small payer with only 15,000 customers - has had its customer base transferred to E.ON. |
No contact centre news of note this time from the TPS or the Fundraising Regulator.
Content accurate as of 18th August 2021
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