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Hoax Calls From Kids - Are They an Issue?
Posted Wed 14 February 2007 @ 8:38 a.m. by Ernie
Does your contact centre get hounded by hoax calls from little brats with too much time on their hands? For some it's a huge issue. In the case of one contact centre whose manager I spoke with today, as many as 10% of inbound calls are hoax calls from children. What do you do about them? What can you do, legally, to dampen the calls or retailliate? Are there steps you can take to deal with this problem within the law? Should there be (infanticide excepted)? Just how big a problem is it? Lets get some discussion going! I look forward to some comments - from Contact Centre managers or others within the TUANZ community. Please tell us your views.

Categories: Technology \| Vendors
Comments (1)

1 Comment

says:
I sympathise with contact centres receiving these calls. Prank callers are not small in number and I have experienced volumes in excess of 1000 of these calls in a single day. Thse calls are often extremely offensive and our staff should not be subjected to that kind of abuse - but what can you do? Prankers hide behind the ability to withhold their caller ID and ring 0800's and emergency services. To add insult to injury, as a business you have to pay for receving these calls. Currently, reporting these callers is ridiculously impractical and achieves little. Operators of 0800 numbers may have options to deny access to their platform - but this is hugely time consuming and does nothing to reduce the activity or change prankers behaviour It seems that the sad facts are, there is little ( if any) recourse. As a suggestion - If mobile network providers take the lead in ensuring that the calls can be easily reported and the caller warned or temporarily disabled then the trend may decline rapidly. Imagine the future - contact centres not paying for the privelege of receiving torrents of abuse while genuine callers are kept waiting.
Added: 15 February 2007, 12:03 p.m.

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