Barclaycard fined for pestering customers with phone calls
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Barclaycard has been fined £50,000 for consistently pestering customers with silent phone calls. The regulator Ofcom levied the maximum possible fine after a lengthy investigation into a high number of complaints.
Silent phone calls occur when call centres with automated systems dial more numbers than staff can deal with. When customers answer the telephone and no agent is available to talk to them, it results in silence on the line.
Ofcom investigated Barclaycard from October 2006 to May 2007 and found that people receiving calls had no idea where they were coming from.
Rules on silent calls laid down in 2006 stipulated that abandoned calls must carry a short message identifying where they came from and must account for no more than 3% of all live calls made in the space of 24 hours.
Ofcom did not say what Barclaycard’s silent call rate was, but said the number of silent, abandoned calls made by Barclaycard was substantially more than the 16,000 calls for which Abbey National was fined in a previous case.
The regulator also found that some of Barclaycard’s call centres had no procedures in place to prevent people receiving repeated abandoned calls over a short period of time.
Barclaycard issued a statement saying, ‘we recognise that all calls, irrespective of the purpose, should be made in the right way and we accept that our processes, in place at the time of the review by Ofcom, were inadequate. As a result, we offer a full apology for any inconvenience and distress to our customers that these calls caused.’
There is no doubt that silent calls, especially if repeated several times in a short period can be a real nuisance and so this fine is, in my view, entirely justified.
I’m worried however, that the maximum fine of £50,000 is not going to be enough. To a large company such as Barclaycard that fine will be peanuts and while it will make them consider their procedures, it is certainly not high enough to guarantee that this will not happen again.
Barclaycard probably feel that they have avoided any real punishment for this breach of communications regulations, despite their PR people making contrite noises.
Has the time now come to raise the maximum amount companies can be fined and perhaps make it a percentage of their profits? That would certainly make them think twice about flouting the rules.
