Episode 7: The Evolving Landscape of DNC List Management

Welcome to Enformed Insights, the official podcast of Enformion.com, and your guide to the world of public records and data analysis. Join our host, Fred Pfeiffer, as he interviews industry experts and shares practical tips for navigating the future of digital information.  

0:20 

Isaac Schloss is the Chief Product Officer for Contact Center Compliance, thank you for joining the Informed Insights podcast. Could you share with us a bit about your background and your road to your current position as Chief Product Officer at DNC.com? 

0:36 

Yeah, it’s actually a fun story. So I’ve been in the contact center industry for almost my entire professional career. I’d say I’ve been in this industry for about 25 years now, a little bit more actually –  

and DNC.com really became a company out of the introduction of the federal Do Not Call list.  

0:58 

That’s where we started, that was what businesses needed at the time and quite frankly our founder and CEO had a call center company at the time – 

so he originally built the solution for himself and then and his company thought “Hey, If I need this, so do other companies, so let’s build something here”. 

I was a customer in the very early days of Contact Center Compliance, or DNC.com which we were better known, of being a business and I relied on DNC.com at this large contact center company I was with – 

1:28 

and as I moved from call center company to call center company, the customers I serviced were different, the methods of communication were different, but I always had DNC.com as my provider for information – 

so that my lists stayed clean and safe for calling. So, when the opportunity arose to join the team and be here to be their head of product it just made sense. 

I love the company, I love the product, I’ve seen the longevity of employment of people we’ve got. People on our sales team that have been here for over 20 years, so I mean we’re really a stable organization and it just it seemed like the right fit for me. 

1:58 

What are your key leadership principles and how do you apply them at DNC.com? 

2:03 

Realistically, I feel like it’s all about empowerment. There are so many times where you’ve seen employees that have had – and I’m sure you know employees have had this and could speak to this – 

They’ve had their good supervisors, their bad supervisors, and a lot of times when you have the bad it’s because they’re lacking that human element, and they quite frankly don’t empower their employees to get their job done. 

2:23 

Maybe that’s not providing the proper tools, maybe that’s not providing the proper just freedom to fail or succeed on your own merit. 

So, I’ve tried to create basically the opposite of that where I’m about team empowerment – I try not to micromanage but more point people in a direction that I’d like them to go and then be there to support them – 

rather than, you know, just drilling in into them to make sure that they’re doing exactly what I want them to do. 

2:48 

What is your approach to building and managing high performing teams? 

2:53 

Well, I always try to hire people that are better than me. 

You know, I guess a generalist of sorts, a Jack of all trades – specialists of a few or maybe even none. You know, I’ve always been in technology and from very early my career I was put into a leadership position –  

and even though I started as being able to build a computer from scratch and, you know, create network cables with just a couple of tools and some wire as I would build global IP departments 

3:21 

and I would need, say a network administrator or I need a database administrator, I’d go out and find somebody that had a higher level of specialty in that area than I had. 

You can’t be intimidated by people that are smarter than you or more skilled than you in one area versus another when you’re a leader.  

So, again going back to what I said earlier about the empowerment aspect but then take it a step further and be being able to bring people in that can do the job better than I could do it on my own – 

and trusting their judgment when they say “Hey, listen this is the best way to execute.” 

3:55 

Can you share an example of a time you had to overcome a major operational challenge at at DNC.com? 

4:03 

Yeah, absolutely. It’s the biggest challenge I’ve had, and I really still struggle with this from time to time, is turning away revenue.  

When you’re, you know, in the executive suite of any business you’re always looking at that PNL. 

You’re always looking at that top end revenue, you’re always making sure that things are profitable, you’re managing costs, building or introducing scalability – that sort of thing and everything’s about just growing the revenue of the business. 

4:29 

We are compliance-based organization and the tools that we create and provide are designed to help legal companies stay legal or companies that are struggling become more compliant – struggling from a legal perspective – 

but at the same time too, we get a lot of bad actors that want to try to come in and utilize our software to help them be a better bad actor or be better acting like a bad actor I should say.  

4:54 

So, identifying those opportunities that don’t quite align with what we do and having to find the right way to say no and the right way to properly weed out those entities that are coming in and trying to apply – 

and we’ve employed a number of tactics for that and we’re constantly evolving that to our governance program where we evaluate every single opportunity that we sign to make sure that they are in fact an entity with whom we want to do business. 

5:21 

Yeah, we’re not Amazon where you go on you buy a product and who cares if you’re buying that product or not – you know anybody good guys, bad guys, whatever – they could all buy toothpaste off Amazon or something like that. 

Our solutions are different so we have to be a lot more careful. 

5:35 

Can you share a personal story that highlights your passion for the industry? 

5:40 

Oh absolutely. So, I have been in leadership positions in many advocacy groups for this industry and these are always volunteer positions these are our jobs we take on –  

that, you know other than perhaps a little bit of extra recognition on LinkedIn there’s no personal gain.  

But my mission as I approach things is to raise awareness of how we can have more meaningful and respectful interactions with the consumer market. 

6:07 

There’s a lot of entities out there trying to work with consumers in the US, some are doing it in legal practices, some not, but even the legal processes aren’t necessarily something that are consumer friendly 

You know, my personal story really around all this would be the various times where I’ve spoken in DC with leaders, or lawmakers I should say, and regulators on affecting or creating meaningful policy, 

6:32 

educating people in the field or speaking in numerous events and just trying to get out there – almost evangelizing the gospel of compliance to the context center industry. 

6:42 

This is a very complex space with a lot of changing laws and regulations – so I’d love to hear your predictions for the future of customer engagement. 

6:50 

Ooo, well privacy laws are getting to be one of the big things that everybody’s looking at right now – 

and when you evaluate the different frameworks that are out there, I think we’re up to 16 or 17 different states that have their own privacy laws.  

AI is being heavily regulated. But, I think the biggest challenge we face right now is that there are bills being proposed today, that are in debate right now, that would essentially shut down outbound telemarketing –  

7:18 

and we’re not talking just even the phone call, we’re talking text messages, we’re talking WhatsApp messages. I could argue SnapChat might be illegal under this new proposal that’s out there. 

It’s crazy how difficult regulators are trying to make it to contact consumers – and I get they’re doing that to try to protect the consumer – but the result is that the consumer is going to have fewer choices and fewer avenues to explore new products. 

7:44 

So, when we look towards the future, I think the future is going to involve changing how we reach consumers and trying to encourage the consumers to initiate that engagement with the brand versus allowing the brand to engage with the consumer. 

So, a very different dynamic than what we’ve seen over the past 50 years since consumer marketing really became a thing over the phone.  

8:09 

First of all, let’s go back to some of those bills that are currently out there – what would you estimate is the is the real possibility of these being passed? Do you think this could actually happen sometime in the near future? 

8:21 

Yeah. So there’s a congressman out of New Jersey, a Democrat named Frank Pallone, and he has been very effective in passing legislation to try to tighten up certain aspects of the contact center industry –  

and one of the things he did, which I think was a really positive move, was something called the Trace Act. 

8:39 

He was a big part of that and that piece of legislation and that gave carriers a lot more control over being able to trace the source of a phone call.  

It has led to the ability to shut down a lot of bad actors in the industry and so he’s got a reputation of coming up – and this is just one of the many positive things that he has done – 

So, I start with that because I don’t want to paint congressman Pallone in a bad light. 

9:05 

I disagree with the current bill that he’s behind which is called the Do Not Disturb Act and in the do not disturb act he’s trying to define, or better define, what a robocall is –  

and it’s funny, you hear people talk about robocalls all the time and how robocalls are illegal and all that other stuff. 

9:22 

There’s no legal definition at the federal level of a robocall so he’s trying to create one which is great because at least now we can all know what we’re talking about and what we’re all trying to outlaw. 

But his definition of a robocall is fascinating because the way it’s read, and I’ve spoke with many attorneys on this I’ve done podcasts on this before where they talk about it, could include emails –  

9:46 

it could include any message that could be transmitted to or from a phone including SMS messages of course. 

The less common things like WhatsApp messages which is very popular and say Europe and I think we’ll have more work here soon. 

Facebook messaging, I can go on, any sort of communication to a mobile device or from a mobile device could be considered illegal under this bill including email, which everybody markets over email. 

10:13 

You take it a step further and they’re looking to limit the hours of calling from 9 am to 5 pm. 

Now, current federal regulations are 8am to 9pm market time. Some states have more restrictive rules than that but essentially, you know, you’re not talking anything super extreme. 

10:30 

But, in this new bill the only time I’m allowed to try to sell something to someone in the US is essentially when they’re most likely to be at work. 

So, it’s going to be very hard to make an effective sales call when you’re calling the typical consumer who can’t take phone calls while they’re at the office. 

10:46 

Would this bill prohibit direct mail? 

10:49 

I don’t think it would prohibit direct mail because all the specifications talk about everything that has to do with a phone. 

But, you know, I think that some arguments could be made about the effectiveness of direct mail –  

11:01 

and I know that there’s a lot of companies out there like Money Mailer that that still does a lot of direct mail campaigns, but a lot of that just gets thrown in the trash and there’s a high cost to it. 

The biggest benefits of mail campaigns are you’re a lot less likely to face frivolous litigation like you do over phone calls. 

11:17 

So, in a worst case scenario let’s say this bill is passed. What are the ramifications for our industry and how do you think advertisers would potentially respond to sell their goods and services to consumers? 

11:29 

I think they’re going to have to try to put a lot more money into digital messaging, you know, maybe Facebook ads I think those would still be illegal but I’m not sure –  

and Facebook isn’t exactly the most popular platform these days so they might have to try to, you know, just employ a lot more social media advertising in general. But, they’ve got to be very careful about how they do that cause it could fall under this. 

11:52 

I think realistically a lot of legitimate businesses will close shop or will stop doing outbound marketing and will look to something else. 

There was a piece of legislation that passed last year wasn’t a bill necessarily it was a rule change by the FCC that changed some of the consent requirements and by in large it just has to do with pre recorded calls –  

12:17 

which I don’t like recorded calls unless we’re talking about very specific use cases like a confirmation that prescription has been refilled or something like that. 

But, because these rules were getting so scary and so dangerous I spoke with one woman, and I don’t know if she would want me to disclose her business so I’ll keep her anonymous –  

12:34 

but she works for a very large, very reputable organization in the insurance space, she’s I believe their chief legal officer, and she said that they just made a policy based on that alone to stop outbound phone calling. 

With that much more limited bill in my opinion stopping a large, large enterprise from doing outbound calling, I can only imagine what this one will do. 

12:58 

So, you’re going to see a lot of workers throughout the US lose their jobs in call centers and you’re also going to see a significant economic impact because a lot of businesses that try to drive blood donations for example won’t be that effective –  

because they’re not able to reach consumers at the hours they’re most likely to answer their phone. 

13:16 

What are DNC.com’s key differentiators in the competitive landscape today? 

13:20 

Well, there’s a lot of companies that do pieces of what we do but there’s few that do everything that we do. 

So, one out of the gate key differentiators is that we are a full service shop for many of your consumer contact compliance needs. 

Not only can we keep your lists clean, but we can also help more calls get through to your customers by say, making sure that you’re not getting mislabeled as a spammer when you’re trying to call your customers or something along those lines. 

13:50 

We’ve also been in business for a very long time, you know, throughout this call you keep referring to us as DNC.com, or this podcast, and it’s funny because that’s how everybody knows us. 

We don’t have that as a DBA, that’s not our legal name, we are Contact Center Compliance. 

14:06 

But, I would be at a trade show and I’ll say to somebody hey, you know, “I’m with Contact Center Compliance” to tell them what we do and they say “Wow, you sound a lot like DNC.com”. 

I say “Yeah, that’s because we’re the same company!”  

This all goes to, or I say all this because we’ve been in the industry so long, that we got DNC or Do Not Call .com as our web URL because we were one of the first ones in the market with a product like this.  

14:25 

So, our length of time in the industry and providing solutions like this and many of our other proprietary solutions gives us a leg up because we just we simply have the experience to do it better than anybody else.  

14:39 

How does Contact Center Compliance Corporation plan to stay ahead of the emerging technologies and trends in the industry today? 

14:47 

Well, we’re always looking ahead.  

We’re always looking at the direction of the marketing industry and what our customers are going to need to continue to be effective marketers.  

Sometimes that’s solutions, sometimes that’s education and advocacy. 

15:02 

So as just one example one of the things we’re looking at right now, and you’re getting very early information that we haven’t even really advertised yet here, so yeah congratulations. 

We’re going to be hosting an advocacy summit in Washington DC later this year where we’re going to be bringing business leaders, regulators, and lawmakers together –  

15:23 

to not only educate people who might be our customers who are operating in our space as to what’s going on in the regulatory landscape –  

but also scheduled time to meet with lawmakers on the hill and try to help educate them as to what’s going on. 

I did a webinar maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago with Maine’s Public Utility Commission, and I have two gentlemen on there who were behind a bill that just passed in Maine that requires the usage of a reassigned number database – 

15:52 

and I know these gentlemen because I’m on an FCC oversight committee with them and a lot of times on that committee, even in this session, I’m educating them just as much as they’re providing education to the viewers. 

Because, I’m explaining to them “hey this is how this impacts the industry” or “this is how the industry would use a tool like that”, like the reassigned number database 

16:13 

and I fully support this bill that was passed in Maine, I think it’s an excellent idea that protects consumers, it can protect businesses, but this is the kind of smart common sense legislation that we need out there. 

We need laws that help protect everybody but still allow commerce to happen. 

16:30 

So, that’s one of the big ways we’re staying ahead of the needs is we’re trying to work directly with the people making the rules to help them create rules that are easy to follow for businesses to protect consumers –  

and then where there’s a need we’ll create a technological solution to try to help companies fall in line with that law. 

16:48 

That sounds like a great idea that advocacy summit. I hope I could secure an invite to that cause I’d love to be involved in some form or fashion and interview some –  hopefully have another interview with you again at that time. 

What are some of the biggest challenges, I think we’ve kind of touched a little bit on it with some of these potential regulatory changes, but biggest challenges and opportunities facing your industry today? 

17:10 

I think number one is this Do Not Disturb Act. 

This is out there, this is hot this is, you know, really going to hurt us and I know earlier you’d asked what I thought the chances of it passing were. 

You know, it’s really hard to get any bipartisan efforts accomplished in DC, especially these days, and especially in an election year. 

17:28 

But, everybody can agree on one thing – telemarketers are evil – so you want to get some bipartisan bill through so that regardless what party you’re affiliated with you can say “Hey look, I was able to get something accomplished”. 

This is an easy target, over regulation is something that I see is a big threat to us. Frivolous law litigation is right up there with that.  

There are a lot of companies right now there are a lot that are getting sued, often class action lawsuits, for violations of the TCPA –  

17:56 

and if you follow some of the, you know, the industry rags like TCPAworld.com is a great source to catch up on some of the lawsuits that are out there and things like that –  

you’ll read the details of these cases and sometimes you’re like “Yeah, that company is stupid, they shouldn’t have done that – hey good, they got sued – we’re fine.”  

But more often than not you read that and somebody, you know, their finger slipped on their keyboard or something like that and something trivial like that happened and now they’re being sued for $50 million –  

18:23 

or somebody filled out a lead form to be called and now the defendant has to prove that that person actually filled out that form – if they can’t, well then they’re on the hook for millions of dollars. 

I watch a webinar last week of that the colleague did, Eric Troutman, and he was interviewing a guy who is known to be one of the big professional plaintiffs out there that just continues to sue people for professional – to make his money –  

18:48 

and he even said – Hey, I lost this type of case. I’m going to stop bringing lawsuits under this type of case because I just don’t think I can win them right now. So instead I’m going to work with Pallone and others in DC to try to pass this bill because I think that this will help straight things out – 

and then ultimately, he didn’t quite say in these words, but ultimately it benefits the type of lawsuits that he goes after. 

19:11 

Very little consideration of the consequences of that for a lot of these businesses that are legitimately trying to engage in reputable commerce. 

19:21 

Absolutely, and this is a practice that started once the TCPA was modified to have private right of action provisions that also applied to calls to cell phones and when this started, 

I remember Forbes even read an article about a woman who kept a shoebox full of burner phones under her bed and anytime she traveled she took those burner phones with her, and she came out and said –  

this is accordion Forbes I’m quoting Forbes – something to the effect of “this is my business, this is how I make money” 

19:48 

and one year I think she made like $800,000 and all she did was she waited for her phone to ring and then she sued the company to call because she had gotten all of these phone numbers that were recently returned by someone. 

It was in an area of Florida that was suffering a massive economic downturn. So, she was getting lots of collection calls that were meant for the prior owner of that phone number –  

20:10 

but since they didn’t own that phone number, and she might have been on the do not call list or something like that, she was able to generate a lawsuit. 

There’s lots and lots of stories who made big bucks doing that and just little onesie twosie lawsuits. 

Now, a lot of them make their money on class action lawsuits and businesses, you know, reputable good companies are often on the hook for tens of millions of dollars. 

20:32 

What are some of the most exciting new features or functionalities that DNC.com is currently developing? 

20:38 

So, right now one of our biggest focuses is on call deliverability. Businesses are having a tougher and tougher time getting consumers to answer their phones. 

So, we are continuing to refine our product that – and again this is one of those areas where I have to turn away a lot of customers –  but for those truly compliant companies we try to help come up with new ways to get their calls to be delivered, 

21:00 

so that people who want to talk to them get their phone call. I speak in some seminars all the time and conferences all the time and a lot of times I’ll name my session something like “spam likely don’t attend the session.” 

Because the whole purpose of it is hey when you get a phone call and the phone could be saying “you don’t want to answer this phone”, you don’t, you instinctively say hey spam I don’t want it. 

21:20 

But maybe that’s your doctor’s office calling you, maybe that’s your kid calling you. So, we’re coming up with new features for that. 

We’re also creating tools to help phone companies because, believe it or not, phone companies can’t even fix their own spam problems and they’re getting brand new phone numbers that they’re buying – 

21:39 

in the North American numbering pool and finding out that it’s already labeled as a spam when they give it to their first customer to use it for the very first time. 

So we’re trying to create more solutions to be more proactive fix that quicker and better and allow legal companies to talk to people that want to talk to them. 

21:55 

Can you share a specific example of how Contact Center Compliance Corporation has helped a client achieve significant success? 

22:03 

Oh, absolutely. We have clients that come to us in panic and desperation on a very regular basis because they can’t get their customers to answer their phones. 

So, their revenue is dropping or their mission of customer communication is failing because they can’t get calls to answer, so we help with those situations. 

I’d say right behind that and of equal if not greater importance is we help people avoid getting sued. 

22:32 

Now this is a big one, where we talked about professional plaintiffs earlier where we have those people who make a living suing companies for calling them. 

One of our products is a database of those bad actors and we track them as they get new phone numbers in their arsenal as they, cause they move their phone number around all the time –  

because they want to create new honey pots to catch companies that are just dumb luck they call the wrong phone number. 

23:00 

We try to help detect that and we have had a great success in preventing lawsuits, in fact if you go to our website at DNC.com we say right there on the home screen that there have been zero lawsuits, zero fines, from bad data that has come the usage of our software. 

we’ve got a running counter on our website I think we’re somewhere in like the 80 billion or something like that as far as how many records we have scrubbed to help keep our consumer safe 

23:26 

What are the biggest pain points would you say that most clients come to you with that you’re helping the solve and how do your solutions address them? 

23:33 

Number one is “nobody’s answering my phone calls” and we’ll do a check and when the typical business comes to me and again I’m not talking, you know, Bob’s Bait Shack some unknown organization –  

I’m talking big name banks, car manufacturers. At least 66% of the caller IDs they use for phone calls are labeled as spam.  

So, right out of the gate you’ve got these companies where if I name some names you would say down a list you would say “Yep, know them. Yep, know them. Yep, know them” and you would know that they’re all legitimate organizations. 

24:05 

So, that is the biggest pain point they have right away is; nobody will answer my phone because everything is labeled as spam and I’ve reached out to all the phone companies I’ve done everything I could do nobody can fix it please help I need to make phone calls. 

The second one is somebody’s coming to us and they’re bruised they’re hurt they’re in recovery mode because they just got out of a lawsuit and they just lost tens of millions of dollars –  

24:28 

they had to shuffle the deck with the E team because you know they had to show shareholders or whomever that they were making some serious changes 

and they’re coming to us say “hey we’re lost, we don’t get it our lawyers don’t get it what are we doing wrong how can we be a more compliant business” and they need that education and they need that capability to be good at it. 

24:47 

Let’s say you’re a business owner listening to this pod right now and you’re concerned. What advice would you give in terms of just remaining compliant and their outreach to customers? 

24:57 

Yeah, you know the first thing I would say to them is you can still market, you could still make phone calls send text messages and not have to not have to stay up all night wondering about who’s going to sue you, you just have to have the right tools and know what to do.  

So, first recommendation is always get a good attorney preferably outside council because you get a lot of extra protection that way, to get a good attorney they can review your compliance practices, your consent statements, your disclosures, everything like that. 

25:27 

But again, they have to specialize in this specific field and I would always encourage anybody, you know, if you don’t have an attorney that specialized in that you can reach out to us  

we do not take referral fees from attorneys, so if we recommend somebody to you it’s just because we truly believe in them. 

Secondly is stay educated, obviously I’m going to plug my own website, DNC.com, for information. 

25:50 

But, there’s a lot of other great resources out there there’s a I mentioned TCPA World at one point, Mac Murray Shuster is a wonderful law firm they have fantastic articles, Manatt, Carlton Fields I could go down a list of a lot of good law firms specialize this area.  

Subscribe to their blogs, follow that watch their YouTube broadcasts, and then listen to podcasts – things like this and there’s other platforms out there, other channels out there that will have good content that that helps you stay educated.  

26:20 

Because education is key and when you hear something, you know, let’s say you’re a CEO listening to this right now and saying “what is this do not disturb back what do I do?” 

Well, you’re free to talk to me about it but you know also might trick for you to ask your attorney hey what will this mean for our business if this passes? 

26:37 

We’ve been receiving a lot of questions about the changes the FCC initiated this past year and the ramifications on our industry. 

Could you give your opinion and, you know, what those were for those who are still a little confused. Do you see additional ones? 

I know we’ve talked about a lot of legislations that is out there, but specific to these FCC changes could you elaborate a little bit on what you see going forward? 

27:03 

Sure, so the FCC – the biggest thing that they’ve changed in my opinion is the 1 to 1 consent, and the 1 to 1 consent, I believe, is just due to consent for phone calls and specifically phone calls with prerecorded voice. 

Now, the reason I say “I believe” is because there is some question as to whether or not that also applies to consent for people on the Do Not Call List.  

27:27 

So, you just high level overview of this is consent for the do not call list means hey I’m on the national Do Not Call list, which I actually am on the national Do Not Call list,  

but when I engage with the specific brand I may give them consent to call me even though I’m on the Do Not Call list. 

There are allowances for that consent to be sold, similarly there was consent for prerecorded calls so you can never ever call someone with a prerecord message on their cell phone unless they have given you prior 

27:59 

express written consent that meets the e-sign specifications and all of that shows that they have consented to get that phone call, that pre-recorded phone call, from you. 

It is very clear and that consent could be and commonly was sold. It is very clear that the FCC changed the rules or clarify the rules, you could you could have a whole argument around that, as to whether or not that consent for the pre-recorded call to be sold. 

28:26 

There is some argument in a few petitions to the FCC to clarify whether or not that also applies to the Do Not Call. So, with this with the known part with prerecorded messages essentially what that means is when a consumer gives consent to get a call 

with a pre-recorded message they have to give that specifically to the seller or the provider of that product and service. 

So, the way it works right now, let’s just use Lendingtree as an example, go to Lendingtree.com, very well known brand I personally use them – had a great experience. 

29:00 

When you signed up with them in the past and gave that consent to be called, they could sell that to whatever four banks they wanted to sell that to and those four banks had authorization to call you with prerecorded messages. 

That has now gone away to where Lending Tree can’t just pick four banks, they have to say hey here are the banks we’d like to sell it to and then you have to consent to each of those. 

29:27 

Or, they simply when they sell it whoever they’re selling it to can’t use prerecorded voice calls to call you.  

I don’t believe that that selling consent stops all consent for telemarketing, nor do I think it’s going to shut down telemarketing completely but definitely prerecorded messages you need to reevaluate your strategy. 

29:45 

However, I would also argue “are your prerecorded messages that effective?” some businesses must feel they are because it gets used an awful lot,  

but I know as a consumer I don’t like when I answer my phone and I’ve got a message being played to me. If someone needs to talk to me, I’d rather talk to a human. 

30:03 

Isaac, I can’t thank you enough for your time today. 

This was a really great discussion, and I really enjoyed and learned a lot and I look forward to hopefully having you on the Enformed Insights podcast again. 

30:15 

Thank you very much!