Spam, Robocalls and Reputation Monitoring! Oh my!

"How can we block spam calls?"

It’s a question we face regularly here at Unified. And on the surface, it feels there should be a simple way to accomplish this, especially since the phone company can tell me what’s likely a spam call before I even pick up the call on my cellphone….
 
There is no denying the avalanche of spam and robocalls we all experience daily. And the increased sophistication in spoofing numbers and caller ID to entice the person being called to answer.

The sheer volume of spam and robocalls can have a damaging impact on businesses in a number of ways.

One of our customers, a large regional financial services firm, reported 50-60% of the calls to their main number were robocalls or spam. When answering the call the attendant would hear dead air, and then sometimes connect to a person, but other times just disconnect. That is a crippling amount of time and effort to divert calls the organization doesn’t want!
 
Further, this concept of labeling a call on the outbound side also becomes critically important for businesses.
 

In today’s world, your phone rings. You glance down at your desk to see your phone display “Possible Spam,” then turn back to your monitor and send that email without another thought.

Robocalls like this get completely ignored these days. But what if that wasn’t a robocall? What if it was a reminder about an appointment? Opportunity (and appointment) missed.

You need to know the facts about your phone number's reputation to avoid spam mislabeling. It has a significant impact on business and customer experience. For any business doing outbound calls, a good number reputation is essential.

For a deeper dive and understanding of Phone Number Reputation, visit our Spam, Robocalls & Reputation Monitoring White Paper: Learn more

What Can We Do?

On the inbound side, there are several different solutions we can design and deliver for the business. For the Financial services firm discussed above, a simple enroute message forcing callers to hit a digit to continue on to the attendant, helped eliminate more than 95% of the robocalls to the main number for that customer. WIN!
 
Also on the inbound side, there are software programs that can block or reroute calls from certain phone numbers. This works best when the same person is repeatedly calling the organization, but it’s not necessarily a robocall. WIN!

But on the outbound side, it really gets a little tricky. Consider what impact it would have to your organization if your main number was mislabeled as “spam” or if your top salesperson or top recruiter’s number was mislabeled as “spam”. That could result in 20-30% of higher drop-in contact rates, which for an outbound business development organization could be devastating.
 
There’s no way to instantly clean up your phone number reputation. But, by working with Unified Technologies and one of our reputation management partners, you can correct your call labeling. We’ll help manage providers, analytics companies, and call-blocking apps for you. 

With a high degree of success, these services can help with: 

• Registering your numbers with analytic platforms 
• Accessing and monitoring your reputation data 
• Removing Negative labeling automatically 
• Creating visibility into number reputation with reporting and analytics 

Number reputation and call labeling consider many different factors, but all may be flawed. It’s important to identify and manage your reputation before answer rates plummet and revenue takes a turn for the worst. Fixing the situation is one reputation manager away.  

For more information, go to our Spam, Robocalls & Reputation Monitoring White Paper: Learn more

If your organization is struggling with spam, robocalls and/or reputation management, please CONTACT US or call Customer Care at 800.489.4103.