As a business, you face a dilemma. To succeed, you need to talk to your customers. Yet, because of the bombardment of spam calls, customers are reluctant to answer their phones.
So, how can you get people to answer your business calls? It starts by building a solid reputation. First and foremost, you’ll want to adopt good calling practices. That includes things like calling during appropriate time windows, citing the reason for your call upfront, and monitoring your call center to ensure agents are responding appropriately to customers.
There are also certain calling tactics to avoid. Over the past few years, the Federal Communication Commission has put in place regulations forcing voice service providers to tackle the spam and scam problem. Beyond governmental mandates, many phone carriers, mobile device manufacturers, and app creators have created spam detection software that identifies unwanted calls and can flag them as possible spam or fraud, or even block them completely.
Legitimate businesses employing good calling practices should have no problem getting past spam filters. However, there are certain call center practices you should avoid that could get your outbound calling numbers labeled as spam.
Neighbor spoofing is a common way for scammers to get people to pick up their calls, using a phone number similar to one where the recipient lives. The call will have the same area code and often the same prefix (the three numbers after the area code) as the recipient’s number. The bad guys buy these numbers in bulk because this technique works to get people to think it’s someone local or a neighbor calling. Because it works, valid businesses also buy local or neighbor numbers to increase the chances of their calls being picked up. Unfortunately, doing so also increases your chances of automatically being labeled as spam.
A single phone number in use by a call center for multiple, unrelated businesses will
create a mix of reputation signals for all businesses involved. As it is not possible for
spam filters to tell which business is being represented for each call, it is a better idea
to use dedicated phone numbers for different businesses.
To discover the other 8 tips that will reduce the likelihood of your calls being flagged as spam, download the eBook 10 Tips to Improve Your Reputation and Get Your Business Calls Answered.