Thursday 25 September 2008

Sit Down Shut Up

Scottish Tory Boy and myself have been carrying on the terrace humour we enjoyed experienced on Tuesday night's match over at Jeff's blog. So I guess his latest post (especially the title) regarding Nick Clegg's call is in essence some sort of continuation on the theme. (At least it was when I read the title hence mine to accentuate STB's point)

Of course everything he says is highly factual regarding the decision by the Information Commissioner's Office. To continue the football analogy I'm ashamed as a call centre employee that having had a football club board who seemed to know little about football but could run a call centre, I appear to have a party management who know nothing about call regulations. Maybe Chris Rennard and Pearse Flynn should compare notes.

I had qualms from when this was first muted, apart from the fact haven't seen the Scottish reaction to Salmond's I don't feel it is a effective way of communication of any sort of message. But as I didn't have the full facts I limited my response to speculation on a number of points. However, when I heard they hadn't pre-screened the script with the IOC alarm bells rang. The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) that we have to use for each inbound call and option is very carefully vetted for all manner of reasons legal and otherwise. One inclusion is always the DPQ (Data Protection Question) for UK calls and other countries with similar legislation which is when the customer confirms or denies certain uses of the information they will be giving during the call.

Now the party has been reprimanded and I think it is high time that we used the knowledge and resources within the party for the best effect. I know there are a number of communication employees with ties to the party. I'm not sure who, if any of them were contacted in relation to this call. One of the things that attracted me to Ros Scott's campaign for president of our party was that she wants to carry out a skills audit of the membership to be able to put in best practise for key elements of our party. This would have been one example where such an audit would have come in handy as it appears that a little knowledge was used in a foolish way.

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