So, July 1st has come and gone, and the new
Canada Anti-Spam Legislation has kicked in.
Up to July 1st, I received all sorts of panicked ‘please
confirm your subscription and consent’ emails … However, now that the deadline
has come and gone, my inbox still has no shortage of emails from Oprah, fine
purveyors of LED shoelaces, and hurricane mops.
So what has really changed?
Well, to begin with, any spam you receive you can report
online at www.fightspam.gc.ca, or even
forward examples of spam to spam@fightspam.gc.ca
for review by the CRTC. However, until
some fines are levied, I don’t imagine the offenders will really stop what they
are doing. I imagine in many cases, they
are based outside of Canada and have no idea they are now breaking the law and
subject to fines. Perhaps they should
read their emails…
What This Means For
The Collection Industry
I believe the Canada Anti-Spam Legislation is going to have
a huge impact on our industry, but not in the way most people think. We are in the business of communication, so
that means we often send emails, texts, and social media messages – and the
CASL changes the rules as far as everything goes about consent.
On the collection end of things, nothing has changed –
reaching out to consumers about a debt falls under the ‘pursuit or enforcement
of a legal right’ exclusion under the CASL.
I imagine someone who was contacted as a wrong number might be able to
kick up a fuss, but as long as common sense and decent business practices
prevail, I don’t imagine much will change here.
On the sales end of things, I expect a much bigger
change. Recently, I attended a workshop
hosted by David Canton, who has written extensively about the CASL (his excellent blog can be found here), and he advised the CRTC is taking a hard stance against even social
media messages (such as Linkedin InMails, for example) – we will see how this
plays out, but this means we are back to the good old fashioned days where we
used a strange device with wires and buttons to talk to other people called a
telephone.
That wouldn’t be a problem, except that there are probably
600-1000 collection agency sales representatives across Canada, and they are
all calling the same select credit managers.
I spoke to a cable company representative, and she advised me she gets
in the neighbourhood of 20+ calls a month from different collection
vendors. That’s about a call a day. So, the besieged creditors aren’t always
going to pick up the phone and spend hours hearing the same-old sales pitch.
Our industry needs to step into the world of ‘pull’
marketing and less of the ‘push’ sales methodology. Email blasts, telemarketing, and hard-sell
methodology needs to give way to social media engagement, giving away something
of value, and building trust. This means
changing the way our industry is structured inside the company, and putting a
real human face to the people doing the work, allowing them to be reached (and
encouraged to be reached) by creditors. It doesn’t necessarily mean the sky is falling,
but it means we need to reinvent how we reach out to potential clients and have
them be truly interested in what we have to say.
What Do We Do?
Obviously, to protect ourselves under the CASL, we should
organize express consent with our clients and potential clients in the next
year or so, and implied consent should be documented at this point. If you don’t have an Anti-Spam policy, you
absolutely should put one in place (and the smart companies will build it in
with their social media policy).
So, before you send that unsolicited email, have you thought
about how your collection agency is going to survive in the years to come?
If anyone wants to chat about this big change to Canadian
sales methods, and what it means for our industry, I’m always willing to have a
conversation – by all means, give me a call.
Cheers,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data and Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
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