Outgoing Calls Appearing as Spam

Symptom

When calling prospects in Outreach, the outgoing calls are appearing as spam to the recipients, which is negatively impacting pick-up and answer rates.

Applies To

• Outreach Users

Before you begin, you should know:

The FCC has been working with phone network operators to combat the rising number of spam calls and calls made with spoofed caller ID. You can learn more about some of the FCC's efforts here.

As a result of this initiative, when a Prospect receives your call, it is possible their phone could show the caller as UNKNOWN CALLER, SCAM LIKELY, or even block the call entirely. This is done by the Prospect's phone company and so you won't see it happening nor will you be notified.

Note: Verified Caller ID only impacts US purchased numbers and will provide these numbers with the highest attestation level for Shaken/Stir. More details can be found here.

After setting up and enabling your business profile, voice integrity, and verified caller ID - all listed below, those purchased numbers still need to have good calling patterns on them before they're fully registered/validated, and that can take a few days to a week.

Each phone number develops its own reputation with carriers. Setting up your business profile and verification tools gives the carriers more confidence that you're a legitimate business, but it doesn't overwrite the historical reputation of every phone number overnight. As those numbers continue to be used responsibly and consistently, their reputation improves, and spam labels can then be removed. The verification features help accelerate and support that process, but they don't immediately reset a number's reputation.

Think of your phone number like a person's credit score or reputation. Setting up your business profile, verified caller ID, and voice integrity is like providing proof of your identity and opening a legitimate bank account. It tells the carriers "This is a real business!", but just because you've verified your identity doesn't instantly erase any previous concerns or give you perfect credit. The carriers still want to see a consistent history of legitimate behavior over time (in this case, a few days to a week). As you continue making calls with good calling practices from the same number, the carriers gain confidence in that number, and its reputation will improve. It isn't immediate, because the reputation has to be earned over time, but this will help accelerate and expedite that.

Resolution

Best Practices

• Activate Outreach's Voice Integrity feature, which begin to automatically register your U.S. purchased phone numbers as they're being used, reducing the likelihood of being flagged as spam. This will not apply to imported numbers, and only the purchased numbers in our system.
• Enable Verified Caller ID. This helps prospects know who the call is coming from and that it is from a trusted source.
• Use a purchased Outreach phone number for your default number and caller ID instead of an imported phone number. Using an imported number can result in calls being marked as SPAM since the call is not originating from the phone associated with the imported number.
• Avoid making high volumes of short calls close together from the same phone number in Outreach. We recommend users attempt to maintain a regular traffic volume, without unusual spiking. Carriers monitor patterns of calls from the same number to their networks and label calls from that number to their customer as potential SPAM.
• Avoid high volumes of calls from local presence numbers due to multiple reps dialing the same area code. If you have multiple users calling into the same area code, allocate them their own numbers rather than all using the same shared number. Making only these type of "neighbor" calls by mirroring the first few digits of the destination phone number in the from number is associated with spam callers and network operators look for this behavior.
• Be conscientious about when and how often you call. Avoid placing calls for legitimate business purposes too frequently, or at odd hours.
• Ensure the people you call know who you are and what their call options are. Provide callees a clear identification of who is calling, along with easy to understand directions for opting out of future calls.
• Twilio.com is the voice provider for Outreach.

Prospect Targeting

• Ensure your calls are targeted at prospects who would likely be interested in receiving a call from you and that your calls have good content. If phone companies receive complaints that you are making unwanted calls to their customers your future calls will be flagged as SPAM by the carrier or even blocked.
• Comply with all "Do Not Call" lists, and other Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requirements.
• Actively maintain prospect contact information, and delete numbers that don’t successfully connect. Low answer and completion rates are often associated with spam, so avoid calling unassigned or disconnected numbers as much as possible.

Additional Information

How to enable Verified Caller ID

How to enable Voice Integrity