Consumers benefit from call labels because they provide insightful information about unknown callers. Their caller IDs may display “potential scam” or simply “spam,” which results in them ignoring or blocking these incoming calls.

Legitimate businesses strive for accurate call labels, but too often, their outbound dialing campaigns suffer from incorrect labeling. To prevent your business from losing revenue and consumer trust, you must mitigate and redress negative call labels whenever possible.

You need to understand the factors that often result in negative call labels so that you can avoid receiving them in the first place. Your company should adopt ethical dialing practices and remain compliant with state and federal laws.

Consumers wield significant power over caller IDs these days. They can report illegal robocalls to carriers, alert the FCC, or use a call-blocking app. Just one unknown call or a bad interaction with an agent can result in flags or customer blocks on your number. Consumers simply will not tolerate robocalls or other unethical dialing practices anymore. They now take action.

You can avoid negative labels by practicing good dialing hygiene. One common mistake is placing too many calls from one number in a short period of time. For instance, carriers may flag your number if it logs more than 100 calls a day or 10 calls in a minute. Doing so often results in carriers and analytics engines flagging or labeling your calls as suspicious.

Analytics engines monitor call behavior, including call duration. Robocalls average less than 20 seconds because the called party usually hangs up immediately. 99% of robocalls last less than a minute. Carriers find calls with lower than average duration to be suspicious and may label them as spam or scam.

Analytics engines also use audio fingerprinting to identify scam calls. This process can identify a script that is used across multiple phone numbers, linking it to illegitimate calls. The AEs can then block them and protect consumers from potential scams.

Analytics engines and carriers often use “honeypot” phone numbers that serve as a way to identify malicious callers. A honeypot number is an abandoned consumer phone number that has received many unsolicited calls. These numbers are retired because no consumer wants a new number that attracts robocalls.

The Telephone Science Corporation (TSC) has purchased many of these numbers and keeps track of telemarketers who continue to call them. They have been able to identify bad actors with this honeypot trap.

Phone number attestation ratings determine how accurately a carrier can authenticate a call’s origin. Only an A rating indicates that a call comes from a verified source. Maintaining the highest rating protects your company from receiving negative labeling. Lower attestation ratings of B and particularly C may receive blocks from carriers.

Following proper dialing ethics is the best way to avoid receiving negative call labels. By exercising diligence in outbound dialing, you can maintain your caller ID health and reputation. Such diligence includes:

Legitimate businesses may experience phone number flagging even while following outbound dialing best practices. In the event your numbers are flagged, remediation is the best process to clean up your phone number reputation.

Negative call labels are a major issue throughout the industry. While some companies deserve to have their numbers flagged, many do not. You can prevent these labels by understanding what generates them and embracing best industry practices. If your dialing campaign does suffer from flagged numbers, take immediate steps to remediate the issue directly with carriers and the FCC.