This document has been produced for operators of Predictive Dialling equipment to clarify the calculations required when determining the abandoned call rate as required by Ofcom’s Statement of Policy for Persistent Misuse, published in September 2008. It is produced on behalf of the DMA’s Contact Centres and Telemarketing Council. The DMA wishes to thank Rufus Grig, Dave Nicholls, Steve Smith and Roland Smith for their contribution to this document.

It is necessary because the presence of answering machines has an impact on the genuine abandoned call rate: some calls dropped by a predictive dialler will have actually been answered by an answering machine, and some calls classified as answering machines by equipment will actually have been live calls. The reports and statistical output of most predictive diallers do not factor this in, and it is therefore necessary to be able to demonstrate the true abandoned call rate from those figures that are available from the dialler.