Improper Call Blocking & Labeling

Protecting Outbound Phone Numbers from Negative Call Reputation

Many factors can cause negative reputations on your phone numbers, represented by warning labels like spam, scam, scam likely, or even fraud. These warning call labels negatively impact your ability to connect with prospects/customers and damages brand perception and reputation.

Many businesses/legal call originators are unaware that their calls are improperly blocked at the network level or delivered with negative call labels. They don’t know that this could be a leading cause of their low contact or callback rates.

Removing these negative labels can help positively maintain relationships with prospects/customers, improve connection rates and increase conversion rates. However, many solutions on the market only offer the ability to monitor the problem rather than solving it. Additionally, improper call blocking and labeling can affect any type of call in any industry.

Call Blocking & Labeling + Reputational Analytics

Call blocking and labeling technologies were introduced in 2017 to address the growing number of illegal robocalls from defrauding consumers. These call blocking & labeling technologies assign a reputation to calls via warning tags on incoming call screens and those categorized as scam or fraud may also be blocked at the network level.

Mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), each of the major wireless carriers is obligated to partner with its own analytics engine that leverages call blocking & labeling technologies that use algorithms to label calls.

These algorithms obviously aren’t human and cannot distinguish between the source or intent of the call. Soon after their adoption, the wide net cast by these call blocking and labeling technologies began to catch legal, wanted communications, including those of businesses, who are still unaware that they’ve been caught in the net.

One reason for this is that algorithms driving reputational analytics vary across the mobile networks and undergo frequent updates and changes. Because of these variations, a higher risk rating results in more severe call labels; at their worst, they can block the call altogether.

Call blocking and filtering apps, depending on consumer preference, can be configured to display a wide range of available data associated with a phone number. Apps represent a small percentage of contact rate depreciation, thus, tackling this problem at the carrier-level is the first recommended priority.

Based on our analysis of phone numbers in use across multiple calling industries, we’ve identified an average of 25% of a business’s phone numbers are typically at risk for being improperly blocked or mislabeled, resulting in lost business, productivity, and customer satisfaction equal to a financial loss in the millions of dollars. And this percentage can increase depending on the intent of the call, frequency of outbound dialing attempts, etc.

Relationship & Relevance to STIR/SHAKEN

Despite the introduction of call blocking and labeling technologies, illegal robocall traffic continues to grow. The FCC responded by introducing the TRACED Act, requiring voice service providers to implement a caller ID authentication framework known as STIR/SHAKEN by June of 2021.

With STIR/SHAKEN management still being refined, call blocking and labeling analytics are utilized across the wireless carriers to guide decisions on call labeling.

When STIR/SHAKEN was introduced, many businesses and providers incorrectly believed that STIR/SHAKEN would completely take care of robocalling and call labeling issues. Its purpose was to verify the identity of the calling party and their authorization to use/deliver voice traffic on the identified phone number.

And as a point of clarification, the purpose of STIR/SHAKEN is to reduce the amount of illegally spoofed calls (Spoofing refers to illegal identity impersonation. There are both legal and illegal spoofing practices.) STIR/SHAKEN does not weigh in, in any way, on a call’s reputation or the labeling it may receive.

Reputational analytics uses a technology separate from STIR/SHAKEN and displays labels such as spam or scam when a call lands on the called party’s mobile device, whether it’s been STIR/SHAKEN verified or not. Being STIR/SHAKEN compliant does not have any impact on calls labeled scam or spam. To address this, call reputation needs to be addressed at the analytics level.

STIR/SHAKEN calls receive a verification indicator – like a grey checkmark on iOS/Apple device calls, for example – to identify that an incoming call is coming from a source authorized to use that phone number, as opposed to a bad actor who may be illegally spoofing the number without authorized consent.

Another important aspect of this is Attestation & Attestation levels. Attestation Levels are the levels of certainty behind the identity/source and authorized usage of the phone number powered by STIR/SHAKEN. It conveys how certain the originating service provider is in regard to the ownership and/or authorized use of the number being delivered and displayed in conjunction with the calling business’ identity.

Solution: Number Reputation Management

Reputational analytics aren’t going anywhere, and neither are your improper blocking and labeling issues. Therefore, it’s important to implement a reputation management solution to protect your brand identity and retain the trust of your consumers with a solution that provides the following:

• Visibility into the reputation of your outbound phone numbers
• An ability to remediate, or correct, improper labels that attach themselves to your numbers
• Protection from network-level call blocking

Through identity verification and number registration to protect your calling reputation, you’ll be able to remove the roadblocks of improper call blocking and labeling, protect your brand, correct improper labeling, manage ongoing risk, and continue to successfully reach your customers.

For example, average customers typically experience 2-5% increase in contact rates or similar improvements to goal completion metrics. Outliers have experienced 25% or more increases to contact resolution.

Another important aspect of this review is the difference between Reputation Monitoring and Remediation.

As opposed to reputation solutions that only allow you to monitor spam labels with the current status of your phone numbers’ labeling and no way to correct/remove the label across the networks, Coeo’s capabilities offers a solution that provides the control and consistency needed to define how calls are delivered and presented across all the major wireless carriers with complete visibility into remediation status and history of numbers previously mislabeled.

This ongoing remediation helps maintain healthy number reputation, increase contact rates, improve overall call delivery and brand reputation, and provide the necessary insight to structure successful calling campaigns

Additionally, with identity verification and number registration, various calling KPIs begin to turn around almost immediately, and positive results continue to build, across the board.

To that point, a 2023 study found that the protection from calls blocked at the network level achieved by reputation management enabled significantly more calls to be delivered, and, most importantly, 16% more calls to be answered.

A Perspective on Dialing Patterns

Algorithms are subjective and aggressive dialing can be enough to cause spam labels on your calls and phone numbers.

Call Volumes have a big impact on this so you need to understand the relationship between phone number risk and phone number usage. For example, if 99% of an organization’s call traffic is delivered across 1 phone number, and you’re over-dialing on this 1 phone number (whether through an auto-dialer or not), you’ll likely run into spam labeling issues.

Call Intent also has a major impact on call success so using 1 phone number to make a variety of types of calls can be seen as confusing and inconsistent to reputational analytics and lead to an increase in mislabeling associated with your number(s). For example, if 1 number originally recorded as calling about a specific call intent, like sales, is also being used for customer service calls or appointment reminders, this perceived lack of clarity and consistency can appear suspicious and negatively affect a number’s reputation.

Finally, consistency has a large impact on caller success due to the increase in illegal robocall traffic. Reputational analytics can perceive abrupt changes to dialing patterns, sudden spikes in traffic, and frequent number swapping or DID replacing “fraudulent-looking behaviors.”

When dialing patterns used by legal call originators too closely resemble the preferred behaviors of illegal callers, you may experience an increase in improper labeling events on your calls/numbers.