S2 E36: The Impact of One-to-one Consent on Outbound Calling

Audio version

The Impact of One-to-one Consent on Outbound Calling

Transcript

Jordan Eisner: Hello, everybody. Jordan Eisner, host of Compliance Pointers here today with Jason Shatzkamer of OutboundIQ. I know it says OutboundANI in the background, but it’s Outbound IQ, right? That’s a recent change?

Jason Shatzkamer: Yes, it is. It’s a recent rebrand.

Jordan Eisner: But OutboundANI is still the product, the tool, right? Well known for that, of course.

Jason Shatzkamer: Correct.

Jordan Eisner: Good to have you on for the people watching and listening. Jason and I, despite being in some common circles, know a lot of common people we’ve never met before, so we’re doing this live. Well, no, I guess not technically because it’s being recorded and put on later, so if we mess up, we can edit it. But we’re doing this meeting and getting to know each other live, and we’re talking about a fun topic, right?
FCC one-to-one consent created a lot of buzz in the industry, a lot of organizations wondering what’s going to become of next year? Is this going to completely change the game or adapt?

Jason Shatzkamer: The sky is falling.

Jordan Eisner: The sky is falling, right? You seem very concerned and worried.

Jason Shatzkamer: Well, you know what? Let me tell you something. I’ve been in the calling space for a very long time, and I think the day that I was getting into it, I was being told that it’s coming to an end, right? It’s just kind of one of those things, and it never does because people always need to reach other people.
That’s never going to go away. That’s how things happen. That’s how things get done. So outreach is always going to be important, and it’s always going to be present. The one thing that’s been constant over all those years is that you never have the same year twice. It’s always something changing, and we always figure it out.

Jordan Eisner: Well put. You know, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been in the industry to a degree, at least consulting or working with organizations in the industry for over 10 years, and same sentiment. It’s coming to an end. People aren’t doing that anymore, but with tech scene and technology, but your point’s exactly valid. You’ve got to be able to reach consumers some way, and technology is always interplaying that, and rules around the privacy and invasiveness of that are always in play.

Jason Shatzkamer: The consumers want you to reach them.

Jordan Eisner: They just don’t know it.

Jason Shatzkamer: Well, no, they do. I think historically, and again, this will all narrow in as we talk more about the one-to-one consent. Historically, you were calling people who didn’t want you to be calling. At the end of the day, when the consumers are relevant and the time is right, the consumers want you to be able to reach them, and it’s your job to be able to do it well.

Jordan Eisner: Before we do dive in, I’ll remind our listeners, of course, that I work for CompliancePoint. CompliancePoint is the host of this podcast. We’re an information security, data privacy, and marketing compliance consulting firm focused on risk management.
Jason is CEO of Outbound IQ. This is a technology-driven company. They help companies effectively engage with the marketplace through outbound dialing efforts. Our partners, in a way, right? I know through our parent company and, again, mentioning a lot of the similar circles where we work with a lot of similar clients for different areas. But again, to your point, it’s people that want to reach consumers. They want to do it right. They want to do it effectively, and they want to do it compliantly. I think that’s really the crossroads of where our two companies overlap with the customers in the marketplace we serve.
Great to have you on. Thank you for joining us. First question, what do you see across your customer base, right, as one-to-one approaches?

Jason Shatzkamer: It’s kind of a tricky question because we have all kinds of different customers on our platform and they’ve all got kind of their own little thing that they’re dealing with.
I would say it’s been most prominent today, and a lot of our customers are in the higher education vertical. Now anybody who’s ever done anything in multi-vertical contact center knows that there is no more conservative audience when it comes to compliance than higher education. You can usually get a pretty good vibe of what’s coming down the pipeline in the other industries by what’s starting to come down the pipeline in EDU.
So I look at the higher educations, like, again, Trusted Forum, JorNaya, all of these other things that are just now starting to materialize as requirements in health insurance and various other verticals, they were there for years in higher education before that, right?
It was just a standard. You couldn’t do anything in higher education without it. So they’re usually on the cutting edge. They’re usually pushing the boundaries of compliance. So we have a lot of customers in that space. We’re getting to watch that.
We have lots of lead generation customers who are trying to do their jobs. They have their own particular cross to bear, perhaps the biggest cross to bear because of their business model inherently.
And we also have companies who have giant books of EBRs, people that they’ve had as customers or had in their donor databases or had in their customer databases for years, if not decades. And perhaps for those, I feel the worst because that’s the biggest set of confusion. I have this giant thing that’s been in place forever. What am I allowed to do with it?

Jordan Eisner: Yeah, that certainly caught my eye too, right? If I’m reading it, reading the blog post on it, that’s going to be really cumbersome.

Jason Shatzkamer: Yeah, they have to make sense of what they’ve got first.
So yeah, everybody now, how is it materializing specifically in EDU where I think it’s making its public debut? Tracking, tracking and reporting is number one, establishing the baseline. We’re already seeing that manifest, right?
We are 30 days or 90 days out from potentially from the regulation change to one to one. And at that time, your older stuff that came in prior to one to one is going to start to become far less usable, if usable at all. And when that happens, you need to be able to know which of the stuff is one to one and which isn’t. And what we’re starting to see is the appearance of that. People are starting to track whether these records are one to one. They’re having their publishers posting over whether the records are one to one. They’re tracking it all the way through their systems so they know what to do with it.
On the lead generation side and on the traffic generation side, we’re starting to see the implementation of pre-pings, which are a requirement because now you’re going to display a single brand in your opt-in and your consent language. So it has to be the most relevant, the most available, the most correct fit brand that you put in there because now every one of these opt-ins, every one of these one-to-one presentations is a gamble.

Jordan Eisner: I forget the language they use. I had it pulled up somewhere. So logical and topically related and how that’s defined. Even not just from Legion and their partners and organizations using it, but even an organization that owns several different brands and affiliates.

Jason Shatzkamer: Well, and again, because that’s on a singular website, but when you’re in the affiliate marketing space, even away from the perspective of the contact center and just on the perspective of the data provider, the person presenting that opt-in, if they guess correctly on that particular consent, they will get that consumer’s consent. If they guess wrong, the consumer is just going to say no, and there are no other options. That’s it. You’ve wasted your, you’ve lost, you’ve swung and you’ve missed.
So everyone’s a gamble. Being more correct with the consent as it loads involves a whole bunch of technical communication between that website and all of its potential buyers of those opt-ins and which ones fit right logically and topically and which ones have availability for that record, which ones don’t, where is it a duplicate? Where is it not being perfect with that consent display becomes mission critical at this moment.
And in the world of outbound dialing, we’re seeing changes too, as people are less confident in what they’ve got in their existing databases as it overlays the new rule and as they’re separating out the traffic that is coming in with one-to-one, we’re seeing a lot more intermingling of dialing mechanisms. People are leveraging auto dialing where they can and manual dialing where they’re not sure or where they can’t. And we’re starting to see those types of things manifest in the operations.

Jordan Eisner: Yeah, that’s a clear distinction you just brought up too. And for our listeners, these apply when you’re using automated technology. And so that just brings that to the forefront again, that difference of opinions and interpretation around what’s an auto dialer or not. So that confusion or that concern, that uncertainty is reinjected with this new rules, one-to-one consent next year. And so organizations are doing that.
And I was going to ask you too about how you’re seeing that affecting dialing. So I want to hear more on that on the outbound calling. But to wrap up your piece on what you see your customers doing, it sounds like there’s going to be even more onus on organization of data and back end and clear lines of consent and reporting. That’s one big piece. And then also how the consent language presents externally, right? When they’re gathering consent, a lot of scrutiny around that or importance for capturing.

Jason Shatzkamer: Internally for the contact center, the word that I use to describe all of those things that you just said is accuracy and precision. You cannot be sloppy because on the other end of that sloppiness are poor consumers getting yanked around and caught in the fray.
And that’s where this trouble originated. And the concern for the consumer has to be number one. And the way to make that happen is for you to be the best at what you do as you can do.

Jordan Eisner: Yeah, I like that accuracy that sums it up. So more on the outbound calling and how you’re seeing that change system. So using autodialer, maybe yes, or whether there’s some less certainty around it, they’re moving to manual dialer, that sort of function. What other sort of trends or expectations do you have on the outbounding?

Jason Shatzkamer: So I’m going to take a step back there and I’m going to give a little summary of howI watched this whole thing kind of unfold over the course of the years. Now this is not a legal view. It’s a contact center view. So that’s a disclaimer here. I’m not an attorney. Please don’t take anything that I ever say that’s legal advice.
So the change is coming in January for one-to-one consent. So TCPA itself kind of appeared in my memory, give or take around, I don’t know, 2016ish, I want to say is when it started to kind of make its…

Jordan Eisner: You’re talking about the big amendment where they needed to express room and consent. I actually think it was 2013 because I remember the year well here, CompliancePoint, because there was what you’re referring to, then there was like a declaratory ruling, I want to say 2015 or 2016, confusing the matter even more on what’s an auto dialer and I remember the old… Only a rotary phone is not an auto dialer. So yeah, I mean, it was that 2013 to 2016 space. I mean, that’s really where this started to rear its head.

Jason Shatzkamer: So at that time, we had an outbound contact center. And so we were buying traffic, opt-in traffic, real-time opt-ins like everyone else was. When TCPA first came out, I remember going through all of the consent requirements and making sure that the consent language on publisher sites, everything was perfect and that our name was in the consent and all of that kind of stuff. And my memory of this whole process, and this is where again, I always question my own memory, but I swear to you, I remember it being a one name in the consent language disclaimer.
It started, I think, one to one and that would rotate. And I remember it didn’t take long. It didn’t take long, but shortly that one kind of became three. And I don’t know where this magic number three came from, but it was almost like, okay, we can now display three names. So we’re going to put three brands in the consent language on that front page. And that kind of gave us some competitive advantage because we knew who else in our competitive industry was purchasing those records because all of our consents were on the page at once. And that was with three. And now you know that that record could go to potentially three different people.
Well, humans being humans, that three quickly became a nuisance. And so all of a sudden that three became replaced with no names and just a generic link to marketing partners. And you would click this link to see who the marketing partners were. And in there would be a list of like 10 names, maybe even 20 names. And you were like, wow, there’s pretty much everybody in the space. There’s pretty much everybody in the industry. Like they could send everybody’s getting consented for this record.
Then humans being humans, that 10 and 20 became 50, became 100, became a thousand names in that market. I mean, horrible. Now, when that happened, of course, everybody snapped. The regulators snapped, the consumers snapped, everybody snapped. And you know, legislation comes down because humans are humans and that’s all they respond to it seems is legislation. So here we go.
And we’re going back to one-to-one where I personally think where I think this whole thing started to begin with. So we’ve come full circle, you know, through all the different ways of kind of cheating the system. And so we’re back here today.
Now, why does that matter? Why does that story matter? Because the marketing partners link is important because its existence led to many things. Number one, it led to many brands or many businesses getting the same record at the same time when that submit button is clicked. However many that is causing end times, right. End times the number of calls to that consumer.
And a far less probability, one divided by and probability of any one of those multiple companies actually contacting or converting that record. Now when that happens, that makes the record less valuable. And when you make the record less valuable, that pushes down prices. And when you push down prices in order to get in order to keep your revenues, you have to sell more.
And so now we’ve traded a high value, high intent record for a low value, high volume number of records. Now that higher volume of records means implicitly a reduced intent or quality on those records because there’s no such thing as an endless supply of high-intent consumers. That would be great if there was, but there isn’t. Every additional consumer is harder and harder to get. So if you have to get more, you’re implicitly going to get less and less intent people as you build up the number of records, which means we have to make even more calls in order to make the right number of contacts, which leads to the right number of conversions, which makes any of the math work.
And now because consent at the time and the marketing partner’s length was obtained, say for a thousand brands, but initially only sold to 10, well, all of a sudden, two weeks later I can take a batch of those same records that I sold previously and sell them to another 10 companies as a batch of age data. This was the new market was aged data. Technically everybody had opted in. All thousand had gotten consent to call, but we only sold it to 10. We’re going to sell it to another 10 and another 10 and another 10 and another 10. And we’re really going to make that, that, that those opt-ins go far.
So what that led to, in other words, is just a whole lot of bad, the same records being sold over and over to bunches of different companies who are all doing their own thing. And all of that fell down on the consumer. What it led to is perhaps the worst consumer experience and the worst possible treatment for that single lone individual who maybe completed one single form at two in the morning to try to apply for a warehousing job down the street. And all of a sudden, boom, their whole world gets turned upside down. And that is ugly. And I’m sorry, but that is not in the best interest of the consumer.
So age data itself relied on, it was built on the notion of multiple simultaneous consents, which with one-to-one is no more, which implies that age data itself is no more. You can’t have it anymore.

Jordan Eisner: It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out. And, you know, I think to your point too, people are going to adjust, they’re going to adapt organizations, going to adapt. But then there’s going to be this sense of, well, how are they going to crack down on it? What sort of enforcement sort of fines? And if those don’t start come and leniency is starting to be assumed and they start to stretch it, are we going to repeat history?

Jason Shatzkamer: I mean, obviously that’s a crystal ball type question. There’s really no way to know. All I know is that there are certain things you can control and prepare for. And the best thing you can do is control it and prepare for it.
So what it means in terms of an individual contact center now and how they view the world is that age data, these batches of records that would come over two week old records, four week old records, these batches of data, ultimately in dialer world become lists of data. With no more age data and one-to-one consent in place. The mere notion of lists itself starts to fade away. We’re not buying a hundred thousand things at once. We’re buying individual things that come trickling in one at a time.
We get real-time opt-ins and we have to optimize our outbound dialing, not for a list of a hundred thousand, which it used to be the job to optimize. How do I, how do I penetrate a list of a hundred thousand? But now it’s about how do I take in one by one individual consumers, a hundred thousand individual consumers and give each of them the optimal experience.
It’s now becoming, how do we make an outreach strategy, which is a new term, right? How do we make an outreach strategy using all available tools and channels that is perfect for each type of consumer that I’m meeting based on who they are and how they got here and what they prefer.
Your job is to identify a lock and to build a key on the fly that fits perfectly. It’s becoming less about dial cadence. Like you take those words that you’ve known and throw them out the window, replace that with consumer experience because each of these individuals that comes to you now has one singular experience with your brand, with your business.
And these days, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, people are very, very hesitant to give anyone a second chance. So you have to take advantage of what you’ve got. And when you get that opt in, you get that real-time one-to-one opt-in, you treat it like it’s gold and you treat it like it’s a human on the other end.

Jordan Eisner: I hope you’re right. It sounds like a better world.

Jason Shatzkamer: It’s happening. I mean, and we watch it with our consumers and with our customers as we guide them through this process, right? The right tool for the right job and at the right time.
What we’re dealing with here continues over time to become the smarter man’s game. Day over day, over day, year over year, over year, the sloppy goes away, the accurate remain, right? And the question is going to become who can get it right and who can do it better and who can reach and connect with the consumer, not just contact the consumer, but connect with the consumer. And that takes work and that takes effort and it’s very hard to do. And so naturally, very few will actually do it and do it properly.
But with our customers, we do everything we can, you know, more and more through automation as we develop more and more features and functions and tools and things like that, as we see these opportunities for our customers in the marketplace. But inescapably through hands-on work and effort and rolling up your sleeves and digging into your systems and trying to help and create orchestrate and execute on optimal consumer journeys and optimal consumer experiences. And in my opinion, the more the industry starts talking like that, the better off everybody’s going to be. And quite frankly, the less relevant regulations are because normally the regulations are simply echoing this exact saying in their own legalese way.

Jordan Eisner: Yeah, I think that’s a good segue to, you know, what I would what I would offer to you is or to our listeners, right, is how to get in touch with you, right, how to get in touch with that OutboundIQ to learn more. And what are some common reasons why people would want to get in touch with you, would want to get in touch with that found IQ to learn more? You know, what are the use cases? Hey, if you’re looking for this, this is what we do. And this is how to reach us.

Jason Shatzkamer: People come to us because they’re having trouble reaching their customers to their satisfaction or to their business’s satisfaction or to where they think they can be. And the reasons for them not doing that is a plenty. It’s you know, it is a very rare moment to walk in and be like, oh, look, there’s the one thing that you’re doing wrong, that if you change that, everything would get better. It never works like that.
It’s because there’s so many people analyzing it’s always death by a thousand cuts. It’s little tiny pieces and a whole bunch of different areas that all have to be addressed and tightened. So we say it’s a multifaceted problem of contact rates.
Like there’s facets all over the diamond and you could spend all day long polishing one over and over and over again. And then you take a step back and you look and the diamond still looks horrible. The only way to make that thing sparkle is to spend time on all of the facets and to think about all and polish them all a little bits at a time. It’s amazing what start what this thing starts to look like when you approach it in that way.
To reach me super simple outboundani.com or outboundiq.com or jason@outboundani.com or Jason@outboundiq.com whatever the case may be, you’re going to get ahold of somebody who’s going to get ahold of it. So that part, that part should be very simple and straightforward.
And if I may, I’d like to end on, on one note, and this is just, this is again, it’s a perspective thing because I really do believe that the whole sky is falling. This is going to kill the inbound. No, no, no. That is the wrong perspective.
And here’s the right perspective in my opinion, humble opinion, right? There are rules in our industry. One to one consent is just one of them, but there are rules in our industry that everybody by far and large is subject to.
Similarly, there are rules to the game of basketball. If I want to, I can’t grab the ball and sprint down the court without bouncing the ball and just slam it into the net. Nope. I have to dribble the ball. That’s the rules. May not like it, but that’s the rules. I can’t throw my elbows to knock the defender out of the way because he’s really good. Can’t do that. I’d like to make it easier, but I can’t. That’s the rules. I can’t run through the crowd with the ball to avoid the defenders and then come back in on the other side. Nope. I have to stay within the lines. I may not like it, but those are the rules.
But nobody in basketball views the rules of basketball as problems, as obstacles. No, those are just the rules of basketball. If those weren’t the rules of basketball, it wouldn’t be basketball. It would just be run down the court and put the ball in the net and knock out of the way. That’s not the game. It’s a game of basketball. And our thing has rules too. And the people, the Michael Jordan, the LeBron James, all of these guys, none of them are experts at circumventing the rules, breaking the rules, ignoring the rules, finding workarounds to the rules.
They are the best because despite playing by the same rules as every other person on the court, night after night after night, they perform better than anyone else on the court. And in my opinion, that’s the perspective that should be applied to all of these things, whether it’s one-to-one or anything else. These are the rules of my game. I’m still going to beat everybody else at it.

Jordan Eisner: Well said, Jason. It’s been a pleasure having you on. Just to reiterate for our listeners, you can find them at outboundani.com, outboundiq.com, Jason@outboundiq.com. You’re on LinkedIn.
Look, it’s refreshing your take on it. I think there is a lot of doom and gloom around it. And you’re like an ancient philosopher. You’re talking about the good in it, right? The better experience for the consumers, the higher intent of the leads, how business continue to thrive and consumers can have a better experience through it. That’s refreshing.

Jason Shatzkamer: It doesn’t mean that everything is going to break down. It just means we need to change. And that is not an unhealthy thing. It has been consistently there since the day I entered this industry. And I don’t see anything other than opportunity coming out of the next change.

Jordan Eisner: It’s a great outlook, persistence.
All right. Well, we’re going to have to do this again sometime. For those of you that have any questions for CompliancePoint and our feelings on one-to-one and how we’re helping organizations, you know where to find us, CompliancePoint.com. I’m on LinkedIn as well. There’s many different channels to reach out to us that way. One is connect@CompliancePoint.com, but we’ll continue to publish content like this in the world of marketing compliance, lead generation, TCPA, but also data privacy, information security, cybersecurity, and all the things.
Until next time, thanks, Jason. Thanks, listeners.