Carriers and analytics engines have increased their efforts to protect consumers from unwanted calls. While the high number of robocalls and scam calls people receive makes additional protection necessary, some steps create a level of hyper-vigilance that blocks calls from legitimate organizations.

You can use some strategies to help avoid negative call labels and blocks. If a carrier or analytics engine inaccurately attaches a “spam risk” to your number, though, you will struggle to reach your customers. The good news is that call label remediation can restore your number’s reputation.

Certain calling behaviors attract attention from analytics engines and consumers. If you place too many calls from the same number, it will look suspicious to analytics engines designed to protect consumers from spam.

Similarly, calling people from the same number too often over a period of time can make consumers wary. Some of those people will report the number to their carriers or a third-party app. Once enough people report your number, it will gain a “spam risk” or other negative labels.

Today’s carriers use analytics engines to monitor call behavior and traffic. The most basic analytics engines pay attention to high volumes of calls placed by one number and calls placed outside of normal business hours.

More sophisticated analytics engines can track even more factors to identify unwanted calls. With machine learning, carriers can review call origins, call destinations, call durations, and media types (such as SMS, audio, etc.).

Consumers also play a role in blocking and labeling numbers. If a call seems suspicious, people can report it to their carrier or a third-party app like Robokiller.

A few reports probably won’t apply a negative label to your number. If enough people complain, though, caller ID screens will start displaying “spam risk”, “scam likely”, or other call labels under your number. In some cases, apps will block your number to protect consumers from annoyances.

You can’t have complete control over how your number appears on caller ID screens, but you can follow behaviors that lower the risk of acquiring negative labels.

Most importantly, you need to adopt practices that mitigate your chances of receiving labels. Improper dialing habits make your numbers easy targets, which puts your business at risk of missing sales.

Use the following strategies to improve your dialing practices and reach more customers.

CNAM registration adds your phone number to a database that carriers and analytics engines can use to confirm that your business owns a specific number. Once they can identify you as a known entity with good intentions, your risk of attracting negative labels falls. It isn’t perfect, though, so you should take every precaution possible.

Dialing too heavily will get your number noticed – and probably labeled or blocked. From a carrier’s perspective, heavy dialing looks like spam. Typically, if a single number exceeds the threshold of placing 100 calls per day, it can be deemed as suspicious.

Avoid using a power dialer, and make sure you use carefully vetted lead lists so your agents can connect with interested consumers instead of wasting calls on people who haven’t expressed any interest in your products or services.

Following good dialing ethics will also help you avoid “scam likely” labels. Dialing ethics differ slightly from industry to industry. In general, though, you should:

Pay close attention to your industry’s specific guidelines. For example, you might need to follow additional rules if you work in the healthcare or finance industries.

Always prune your lead lists so you only try to contact interested consumers. If you call a lot of people who don’t want to communicate with you, your number will likely get spam reports.

Perhaps more importantly, never buy lead lists from consent farms. Consent farms use unethical practices – such as lying about their intentions – to collect consumer information. The DOJ recently started cracking down on consent farms. You don’t want anything to do with them.

Finally, ensure the validity of the numbers on your lead lists. Do they offer each person’s current phone number? Are any of the numbers on the national do-not-call list or your internal do-not-call list? If so, don’t dial them.

Unfortunately, call spoofing is still a problem that can damage the reputations of reputable companies. You can mitigate the potential effects of call spoofing by monitoring your outbound DIDs for flags. You should also proactively monitor your numbers across all major carriers to determine whether any of your numbers have become victims of call spoofing.

BatchDialer’s Advanced plan makes monitoring your numbers easy by showing you what appears on caller ID screen screens when you call popular smartphones. Device Cloud uses screenshots from real devices connected to carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Ting, so you see exactly what your contacts see when you call them.

Ideally, you can avoid spam labels that prevent you from reaching your contacts. If your numbers do attract unwanted labels, you need to contact the right carriers and call-blocking apps to have them removed.

The remediation and redressing processes can take a lot of effort, especially when you need to contact several companies about the issue. It’s also a bit difficult to know how to contact the correct party. For example, AT&T relies on Hiya to redress inaccurate call labels. Sprint, Verizon, and U.S. Cellular use TNS Call Guardian.

Want to learn more about the benefits of using BatchDialer? Schedule a demo so you can see how the platform will benefit your business or call center.