Calling hours are the customer's, not yours
A nine in the morning call from your desk can be a six in the morning call at the other end. Time zones are the easiest compliance rule to break by accident, and the easiest one for software to enforce.
The short answer
Calling hours belong to the person you are calling, not to the office placing the call. Work them out from the customer's own time zone, check at the moment of dialling, and let the system stop the call rather than trusting a rota.
Your floor opens at nine. Agents start dialling. Somewhere on the list is a number three time zones west, where it is six in the morning and someone is asleep.
Nobody broke a rule on purpose. The team started at a normal hour and worked a normal list. But the rule is not about your clock. It is about theirs.
Why this one gets broken by accident
Most compliance mistakes need something to go wrong. This one only needs a list that spans a country.
The team is doing nothing unusual. The hours look fine on the wall clock. The only way to see the problem is to convert every number to local time before it is dialled, and no person is going to do that a thousand times a day.
It is also easy to miss at the other end of the day. A floor working an evening shift to catch people at home can be calling well past a reasonable hour several zones away.
Two clocks, one rule
Every outbound call has two local times: yours and theirs. Only one of them counts. Any calling-hours control that reasons about your office hours is measuring the wrong clock.
Working out the customer's time
In most cases the area code gives you the zone. That is a reasonable guess and it is what most systems use.
It is worth being honest that it is a guess. Mobile numbers move with their owners. Someone who kept a number after moving across the country will be classified by where the number was issued, not where they sleep. Where you have a stated time zone on the record, from a form or a previous conversation, trust that instead.
Neither approach is perfect, and that is fine. The point is to be roughly right on purpose rather than precisely wrong by default.
You cannot ask an agent to hold a time-zone map in their head at four on a Friday. This is a rule for software, not for memory.
Check at the moment of dialling
Here the same principle applies as with do-not-call screening. The check has to happen when the call is placed, not when the list is loaded.
A list built at nine in the morning may still be dialling at seven in the evening. A window that was open when the queue was filled can be closed by the time a particular number comes up. So the question is not whether the number was callable this morning. It is whether it is callable now.
Done properly, the number simply is not dialled while its window is shut. It waits and comes back when the window opens. Nothing is lost except the call you should not have made.
Holidays and quiet days
Calling windows are the obvious part. Local holidays are the part teams forget, especially in countries where they vary by region.
A holiday calendar is worth keeping for the same reason business hours are. It also affects your response-time promises, because a clock that keeps running through a public holiday will report you as late for a day nobody worked.
What to check on your own floor
- 01Are calling windows evaluated from the customer's time zone or the campaign's?
- 02Is the check done at dial time, or only when the list was loaded?
- 03What does the system do with a number whose window is closed: skip it, or hold it for later?
- 04Where a record has a stated time zone, is it preferred over the area-code guess?
- 05Does your holiday calendar affect calling, reporting, or both?
None of this is difficult once it is set up. It just cannot live in a rota or a reminder, because the busiest day is exactly the day nobody checks the rota.
Common questions
- Whose time zone decides when you can call?
- The person being called. Calling windows are worked out from where the customer is, not where your floor is, so a team in one country can breach the rule while working perfectly normal hours.
- How do you know a customer's time zone?
- Usually from the area code of the number, which is a good guess rather than a certainty. Mobile numbers travel, so where a number was issued may not be where its owner is. Store a stated time zone on the record when you have one and prefer it over the guess.
- Should a dialer enforce calling hours automatically?
- Yes. A rota or a reminder puts the rule in a person's memory on the busiest day of the week. Software can check the customer's local time at the moment of dialling and simply not place the call.
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