What Do Your Calls Look Like?

By now, it’s pretty common to see phone calls land on our phone screens where instead of a phone number, it shows up as ‘Spam Likely,’ ‘Potential Scam,’ or even ‘Fraud.’ What you may not know is that it could be your phone calls that are getting delivered with these negative labels when you dial your customers. For the most part, businesses are commonly none the wiser about how their calls, and their brand identity, are being transmitted, displayed, and understood by their consumers and clients.  

If you’re a business using outbound voice communications to connect with customers, subscribers, leads, patients, etc., these negative call labels could be displayed on their devices with the phone rings. Or worse, your calls are being blocked without your knowledge. 

Where Did This Come From?

The rise in improper call blocking and labeling events impacting legal calls actually happened in response to the growing number of illegal robocalls. While a lot has been done to fight against these calls from plaguing consumers at the regulatory level, a definitive solution hasn’t been found yet, so robocalls have continued to annoy and defraud citizens.  

When the FCC began to combat illegal robocalls, a new wave of call blocking and labeling technologies was implemented via apps and at the carrier level that had many unintended consequences on legal call originators. Many businesses and industries have suffered unintentional drops in contact rates and customer engagement; we were all left struggling to find a solution.  

What’s more, finding a solution is challenging because of the discrepancies in how call blocking and labeling have been established across the network. No two service providers or analytics engines are perceiving your calling identity, your phone numbers, or the way you’re using those numbers in the same way. 

We Call this Phone Number Reputation 

What exactly is number reputation? It’s our industry jargon for the labels and status of your phone numbers after the algorithmic scoring based on patterns in call delivery, perceived risk of answering, associated complaints, etc. All the major wireless carriers use phone number reputation to decide how calls will be displayed to consumers.  

Good reputation = a clean phone number displayed  
Bad reputation = labels like Potential Spam, Scam Likely, or Fraud Risk displayed instead 

Maintaining a healthy phone number reputation is still the answer within the big picture of your overall dialing strategy. The algorithms have been around for a few years now, and the only thing that remains the same is that they keep changing and evolving in approach.  

What You Can Do About It

Quick fixes won’t cut it. The best way to approach your call blocking and labeling issues is actually by prioritizing your digital calling identity.  

The first step you should take is to verify that you own the phone numbers you use and that you are dialing on them compliantly, with the carriers and the analytics engines they use to label your calls with tags like spam or scam. This is where Five9 comes in. 

Our solution prioritizes your calling identity so that every phone number you register with us is verified as a trusted calling source. We do this through our Know Your Customer-based onboarding process, which decisively concludes that you have been vetted and validated to be who you say you are and conveys that information to the carriers and their analytics partners.  

Based on our analysis of phone numbers used across various industries conducting outbound calls, we’ve identified that an average of 25% of a business’ phone numbers are typically at risk for improper call labeling, resulting in spam tagging. The only way to fix spam labels is through a validated remediation process, like the one we offer, that disputes the label at the carrier level to get it removed from your numbers. Only then can you keep calling confidently, knowing that your numbers are protected and that any spam labeling barriers are gone.  

Get Started

Trust in your calls starts with reputation management. If you’re a legal business calling for legitimate business purposes and you’re struggling to escape the constant cycle of Scam and Spam labeling or call blocking, this is actually a pretty straightforward issue to tackle. It starts with identity vetting, continues through reputation monitoring, and proactively progresses through blocking and labeling remediation to correct issues as they arise.

If you haven’t started an investigation into whether or not call labeling is impacting your ability to connect, reach out today for recommendations on how to get started.