Communication Protection Coalition

Has your company seen a depression in contact rates lately? Have your customers been asking why your calls show as “Scam Likely” or “Fraud Alert”?
 
As a result of the FCC’s Robocall Strike Force initiatives, the carriers and their associated analytics companies are making decisions about your calls. These unregulated analytics companies apply their own algorithms to determine if a call should be blocked from ringing your customer’s phone or replace your Caller ID with a label such as “Scam Likely”, “Robocaller”, “Fraud Call”, “Telemarketer” or “Debt Collector”.
 
The issue that is very concerning to PACE and our members is that the algorithms do not take into account legal entities delivering legal calls for which consent has been provided. The analytics companies are merely applying their algorithm without knowing all the facts regarding the call. Essentially, your calls could be going into a blackhole to which you have no visibility.
 
PACE is not taking a passive look at this issue. This is the most significant issue for our members, who use the telephone to communicate with their customers, since Do Not Call legislation. The reason that this call blocking and labeling issue came up is that the FCC wants to stop illegal robocalls. We all want that. No “ifs”, “ands” or “buts”. Unfortunately, as implemented without careful thought about unintended consequences, legal communication between companies and their customers has been affected greatly. 
 
PACE’s end goal is to make sure that every legal call that a company places to its customers gets to the customer unencumbered without false labels or never getting there at all because it was blocked. The tactics of how we get there are now being considered. Our first step is to get all the stakeholders to agree that this is an issue.  By organizing a coalition led by PACE, we can solve this in the short term before a long-term solution that has been proposed by the FCC Robocall Taskforce is implemented.  

On Wednesday September 20, 2017, PACE convened a meeting of stakeholders which included carriers, analytic companies, app developers, trade associations and regulators. Each constituency presented their side of the story, so that there were no wrong assumptions still in play. The meeting was very well attended and there were different points of view that may or may not come together in a solution. There are some next steps already set.
 
PACE has formed a task force that will be driving not only PACE’s strategy, but also the leadership of the coalition. In the next few weeks, we will have a webinar for all PACE members on this topic. Our membership will be updated on the issue, PACE’s strategy and the coalition efforts. 

As discussed during the CPC meeting that was held on Wednesday, September 20^th in Washington, D.C., a best practices “working document” has been generated for mitigating robocall processing impacts on wanted and legitimate communications. 

The downloadable Best Practices Word working document provides you the opportunity to review the best practices as it stands now.
The Template for Edits document allows you to suggest or propose additions/edits.  Once completed, please submit to Karl Koster at and Rebekah Johnson at .  The comments will be collected/summarized, and potentially incorporated into the next draft.

These will also be discussed, as well as any other submissions received, at the January 2018 meeting.  The date/venue of the January meeting will be forthcoming.
 


COALITION MEETING MATERIALS NOW AVAILABLE!
September 2017 Meeting Minutes
Powerpoint presentation

COALITION SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS
Best Practices Documents
Template for Edits

if you have questions or comments.