When a client hands a calling shop a badly sourced list, who should own the fallout

Question

Take a cold calling shop that receives a 9,000 record list from a client, runs it through scrubbing, and finds roughly 6 percent flagged against do-not-call registries, while the client insists the data provider already certified it clean. Re-scrubbing at the vendor's own cost and dropping flagged records is the safer operational call regardless of whose fault the bad data was, even though it delays the campaign and frustrates the client. This exposes a real gap in most calling vendor contracts, and there are three common positions in this business. One, the vendor scrubs every time with no exceptions and eats the cost, treating it as a fixed cost of doing business priced into the rate, on the logic that the vendor's callers are the ones actually dialing. Two, it's the client's list, the client's brand on the call, and the client's chosen data provider, so the client carries responsibility and the vendor dials what it's given after a written warranty that the list is clean. Three, it's negotiated per contract, with cost and responsibility named in a specific clause before the first dial. 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 the specific agreement, not a general answer. Commercially, the shops that hold up well over time tend to gravitate toward option three, a named clause up front, since it avoids exactly the kind of dispute a badly sourced list creates after the fact.

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 a calling shop a badly sourced list, who should own the fallout

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