When a client hands us a badly sourced list, whose problem is the fallout?

Question

We got a list from a newer client last month, 9,000 records, and when my ops person ran it through scrubbing about 6 percent came back flagged against do-not-call registries. The client's answer was that his data provider said it was already clean, and that he'd bought it that way, so it should be fine.

I didn't dial it. We re-scrubbed at our cost and dropped the flagged records, which took two days and delayed the campaign, and he was annoyed about the delay. Then he asked why he was paying us to redo work he'd already paid someone else for.

He has a point, and it exposes something I've never resolved in my own contracts. Three positions exist in this room, and I've heard all of them from other service owners.

One is that the vendor scrubs, every time, no exceptions, and eats the cost. The pitch is that we're the professionals, we know what the flags mean, and our callers are the ones dialing. It makes scrubbing a fixed cost of doing business and prices it into the rate.

Two is that it's the client's list, the client's brand on the call, and the client's chosen data provider, so the client carries it and we dial what we're given after they warrant in writing that it's clean.

Three is that it's negotiated per contract, spelled out before the first dial, with the cost and the responsibility named in a specific clause.

Compliance obligations here depend on federal and state rules that differ and keep changing, and the actual allocation of legal exposure between an investor and a calling vendor is a question for a lawyer who has read your specific agreement, so I'm asking about the commercial norm rather than the legal answer. What do the shops you've worked with actually do, and what do you as an investor expect?

omar_haddad · Answer

Voted for the clause, from a renovation habit rather than a calling one. Every fight I've ever had with an owner came from work that was obviously somebody's responsibility and never written down as whose. Existing conditions, permit delays, the same shape every time.

The part of your post I'd push on is the two day delay. You ate the scrub cost and the schedule hit and got annoyance for it, which means the client learned that handing you a dirty list has no consequence for him. Even if you keep scrubbing every time, bill it as a line item at whatever it actually costs, zero margin if you want to be generous. He'll go back to his data provider and complain to the right person.

Also, option four is more interesting than it looks. If you only call data you sourced, you know the age, you know the trace vendor, and you can price a campaign properly instead of finding out on day one that 6 percent is unusable and the phone numbers are three years old. You'd lose some clients over it. The ones who insist on bringing their own list are usually the ones who insist on a lot of other things too.

When a client hands us a badly sourced list, whose problem is the fallout?

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