October 2, 2024
The Impact of Adverse Call Treatment on Businesses
With the exception of criminals and unethical businesses, everyone wants to enforce reasonable rules that protect the public from robocalls, scams, and other unwanted communications. The FCC, service providers, and other organizations have been working hard to add those protections. Unfortunately, the systems they implement can have an adverse effect on businesses.
Knowing how regulations can impact your outbound numbers’ reputations is important in managing your overall brand reputation. Below, you’ll learn about essential parts of the process and how you can avoid adverse call treatment.
FCC Regulations
The FCC is adopting new telecom regulations to protect consumers. Some of the most important regulations involve the following.
STIR/SHAKEN Framework
The STIR/SHAKEN framework is an automatic call authentication technology that uses digital tokens to prevent call spoofing and illegal robocalling. The FCC has worked with industry leaders to make this technology as robust as possible.
Recently, the government commission has started closing loopholes, targeting significant threats, and warning service providers that they could face fines for helping organizations break regulations.
TRACED Act
The Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act gives the FCC more authority and tools to fight unwanted robocalls. The FCC has used the TRACED Act to implement the STIR/SHAKEN framework, review existing exemptions, pursue organizations that use one-ring scams, and provide resources that help legitimate businesses avoid unwarranted flags, labels, and blocks.
Robocall Mitigation Database
The FCC requires service provider networks to submit robocall mitigation plans. Submitting an approved plan gets the service provider added to the Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD). Those who don’t comply will not receive certification or be added to the database, making it nearly impossible for them to complete calls within the United States.
The RMD coordinates with STIR/SHAKEN to block potential threats from reaching the public.
How Can Adverse Call Treatment Affect Your Business?
In an ideal world, the FCC’s plans would work flawlessly to protect consumers. In the real world, legitimate businesses can find that their numbers get blocked or receive negative labels that warn people not to answer calls.
Not surprisingly, these blocks and labels could hurt your business.
Blocked Calls
Blocked calls make it very difficult to reach new leads. Perhaps even worse, they can damage relationships with existing customers by interfering with your efforts to serve them. If your outbound numbers get blocked, expect to see lower conversion rates, higher customer churn, and growing expenses.
Call Labels
Negative call labels warn consumers to take caution when answering their phones. When your number has a label like “spam likely” or “high risk,” you can expect fewer people to answer your calls.
Negative call labels can also confuse customers and clients who know your number. It looks suspicious when they see your number attached to a negative label warning them to avoid your calls.
Missed Opportunities
Not surprisingly, adverse call treatment makes it harder for your sales team to connect with leads, which makes it harder for your business to generate revenue.
Reduced Customer Trust
Customers who see negative call labels might become wary of doing business with your company. Even if they’ve had positive experiences in the past, the labels create uncertainty.
Additionally, customers can feel frustrated when service providers block your calls. The customer doesn’t know why you haven’t reached them. They just know they haven’t received the service they expect.
Enhanced Compliance Standards
Complying with high standards can force businesses to spend more money and time ensuring their calls reach people. It’s a financial burden many companies don’t expect until blocks or labels start hurting performance.
Protecting Your Phone Numbers
Since the FCC prioritizes consumer protections, there’s a chance that some of your business’s outbound numbers will get flagged or blocked. The good news is that you can take action to protect your phone numbers. However, it will take diligent work.
Ethical and Compliant Dialing Behavior
Some third-party apps and algorithms use consumer complaints to decide whether phone numbers receive labels or blocks. Ethical dialing behaviors that comply with regulations can significantly lower the risk of reports.
Some of the most important behaviors to follow include:
- Complying with federal and industry standards
- Training agents to use compassion when talking to customers and leads
- Cleaning data to remove numbers on the federal Do Not Call Registry, your internal DNC list, and Reassigned Numbers Database (RND)
- Avoiding spammy or outdated calling practices that can look suspicious to service providers, regulators, and consumers
- Persistent caller ID monitoring
Ethical behaviors can decrease the risk of adverse call treatment, but it doesn’t eliminate the chance that your numbers will get blocked or labeled. Caller ID monitoring helps your business determine when flags might be interfering with your outreach efforts.
Call Blocking Redress
When phone numbers get blocked or labeled, your business will need to redress the calls with carriers. Carriers are required to provide single points of contact for call blocking redress. Unfortunately, it can still take a lot of effort to address problems across multiple carriers.
How Caller ID Reputation Can Help
Caller ID Reputation helps companies monitor, manage, and redress adverse call treatment to continue serving their customers without barriers. With Caller ID Reputation’s Device Cloud, you can use real smartphones connected to real carriers to monitor your number reputation. If a number gets flagged, you receive a notification immediately.
If your numbers are affected, remediation professionals on our Managed Services team will resolve the issues on your behalf.
Want to see how Caller ID Reputation can benefit your business? Contact us today to learn more or start a free trial.
