Telecom call transparency is a two-pronged approach to help revitalize the dialing ecosystem. The goal is to re-instill trust with consumers, so they will answer calls from businesses. While telecoms, third-party apps, and analytics engines work to clean up robocalls, businesses must do their part as well.
Call Labels Instill Trust
When properly applied, call labels reveal a call's intent for consumers. Because consumers are wary of scams and robocalls, they will rarely answer unknown calls. An accurate call label can help restore consumer trust.
Phone Number Flags
Phone number flags alert consumers to negative call labels, also known as warning labels. These labels warn consumers to be wary of the incoming call. As a result, most of these calls go unanswered. Some examples of warning labels are:
- Fraud Risk
- High Risk
- Nuisance Likely
- Potential Fraud
- Potential Scam
- Scam Likely
If any of your business numbers display a warning label, you can expect a loss of sales, revenue, and reputation. That’s why label accuracy and call center vigilance are so important to the industry.
Warning labels are helping to instill trust in consumers. They are more likely to answer a call from a company with their valid caller ID information displayed.
Intent Labels
Unlike a warning label, an intent label is not negative. Its goal is to simply show the reason for a call. Intent labels can vary depending on the carrier, but typically include:
- Account Services
- Charity
- Informational
- Jail
- Political
- Prison
- Private
- Non-profit
- Survey
- Telemarketing
While these calls are not necessarily "scams," they may indicate calls that consumers might not wish to answer. A call label simply provides the intent of a call and allows the consumer to make an informed decision about whether to pick up or not.
Call labels are useful for building consumer confidence by giving people accurate information about the incoming call. As consumers get used to labels and flags, they may feel more comfortable answering calls, even if they are labeled as "unknown.”
Consumer Engagement Benefits
When telecom companies practice greater transparency, they restore consumer trust. While this trust transformation will likely take years to complete, the industry must begin laying a framework for call transparency now in order to restore full confidence in the future.
Restored trust improves consumer engagement, and businesses should benefit from higher answer rates. Allowing customers to engage with the process through the use of labels and flags is ultimately good for the entire industry.
The Cost of Low Telecom Transparency
When telecom companies are not transparent with consumers, the dialing community suffers as a whole. Businesses experience a number of negative side effects when consumer confidence plummets.
Wasted Time and Resources
When consumers don't answer their phones out of mistrust, businesses waste time and resources. Your calling campaigns necessarily suffer due to this reluctance. You end up paying for sales agents’ time, dialer usage, and office space while reaping lower profits. Legitimate businesses benefit from call label transparency.
Lowering Brand Quality
When consumers are wary, they are more likely to react negatively toward your brand. If they do not trust your business numbers, they may go online and post a negative review. They often will spread their concerns through word of mouth, and some may even flag your phone numbers as "scam" or "spam" when they are neither.
keptical consumers can harm your business reputation due to suspicions and not facts. Restoring consumer trust is essential to a healthy financial return.
Missed Opportunities
Conversion opportunities are important in outbound campaigns. A loss in these opportunities could lead to a dramatic decline in revenue. Worse, if even your existing customers are not answering your calls, your reputation can plummet.
These negative effects are especially prevalent for time-sensitive communications, such as those from healthcare organizations, schools, or financial institutes. Consumers may miss out on an important call from their doctor because of their mistrust of an unknown number. Who gets the blame? Often, it’s the healthcare organization.
Degrading Consumer Confidence
Consumers are already wary of unknown calls. They assume most unsolicited business calls are scams or, at the very least, a waste of their time. As such, they are more likely to flag and report calls from businesses they are not familiar with.
Awareness of Call Transparency
All businesses should be aware of how call transparency can affect their operations. You should also stay vigilant in monitoring your calling reputation to ensure you are not dialing customers, leads, or consumers with bad numbers.
If your phone number gets flagged, you should take steps to correct this issue. First, identify which carrier or analytics engine issued the flag and why. Alter any of your dialing habits that could have caused flags. Finally, contact the entity that issued the flag to inform them of your remediation efforts.
In that way, you should be able to remove any erroneous flags and labels on your phone numbers and prevent further damage to your company’s reputation.
