FTC

FTC stands for the Federal Trade Commission, a United States government agency that protects consumers from unfair or deceptive business practices. For call centers, the FTC matters because it writes and enforces the Telemarketing Sales Rule — the set of rules that govern how telemarketers may sell over the phone. If you make sales calls to US consumers, the FTC is one of the agencies watching, and its rules apply whether you run one campaign or dozens.

The Telemarketing Sales Rule covers a lot of ground. It requires honoring the national dnc registry, bans misleading or false claims about what you are selling, sets out what you must disclose to the person on the line, and limits how many calls a predictive dialer may abandon. That last point is the abandonment limit — the cap on how often your dialer connects a real person but has no agent free to take the call, leaving them hearing dead air or a recorded message instead of a live voice.

People often mix up the FTC and the fcc. A rough way to keep them apart: the FTC focuses on the telemarketing and sales conduct itself, while the FCC focuses on the telephone network and the rules under the tcpa. In practice the two overlap, and a single calling program can answer to both at once. An illegal robocall campaign, for instance, can draw the attention of either agency depending on which rule it breaks.

The FTC also offers an ftc safe harbor — a way to avoid penalties for the occasional accidental abandoned call if you follow specific procedures, such as measuring your abandonment over a rolling period and playing a clear recorded message when no agent is available. Keeping your dialer inside the abandonment limit and steering well clear of an illegal robocall are the everyday steps that keep the FTC off your back, though none of this is a substitute for proper legal advice on your own program.