Recommendations and Best Practices for Maintaining a Positive Caller Reputation

Maintaining consumer trust in the voice communication channel is critical. Consumers expect to receive wanted and personalized communications, while being protected from spam and unwanted calls. This guide provides updated best practices for maintaining a positive caller reputation.

Why does caller reputation matter?

Throughout the industry, there are continued and increasing efforts to reduce unwanted calls to consumers. These efforts can often lead to calls being screened or blocked. This can make it difficult for your legitimate business calls to reach customers and get answered. This is a list of recommendations and best practices to maintain a positive caller reputation, minimize being blocked or flagged as spam, and improve answer rates.

Telemarketing and Advertising Requirements

If you use Voice Services to place telemarketing or advertising voice calls, you will be required to:

• Obtain the consumers prior consent, as required by applicable law or regulation
• At the beginning of the call, clearly and conspicuously disclosing the purpose of the voice call and identify and accurately represent yourself, or your organization, as applicable;
• It is advisable to consult with your legal council for guidance with applicable laws and regulations related to telemarketing and advertising voice calls in your jurisdiction and your end users jurisdiction.

Positive Caller Reputation Basic Do’s and Don’ts

• Comply with all “Do Not Call” lists (e.g. https://www.donotcall.gov/ US Only), and other Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) Act 47 U.S.C. § 227 requirements (US Only).
• Keep your calling list(s) up to date, and remove numbers that don’t connect. 
• Unreasonable answer and completion rates in accordance compared with normal use rates are often associated with spammers, so you don’t want to be calling unassigned or disconnected numbers regularly, and no random “wardialing”. 
• Provide a number and/or contact information that called parties can use to report alleged violations. This is often done on websites, in emails and in first texts.
• Be aware and mindful of carrier practices related to intra exchange calls and legitimate code-prefixes for the location phone number in the “from” number, aka “neighbor” calls. Purchase a local number for only your true location. Spoofing this method is often used by spam callers. Network operator call screening algorithms are aggressively monitoring for this behavior.

Be consistent in your phone number usage

• Avoid using the same telephone number for multiple purposes (i.e. marketing, surveys, and support callbacks). To help reduce the likelihood of your calls being categorized as spam, we recommend aligning the context and content of your calls over a specific phone number throughout the life of your campaign. Phone numbers that have been reassigned for other purposes should wait at least 45 days before being reintroduced in a new campaign.

Be consistent in your outbound call volume

• If your use case allows it, attempt to maintain a regular traffic volume, without unusual spiking.
• Gradually ramp-up new campaign call volume incrementally over time, and avoid going from zero to full volume in a short period of time..
• Calls for legitimate business purposes should not be too frequent, or outside of common working hours. What is deemed too frequent varies by use case. For example, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act notes that 8 calls to a recipient phone number within seven consecutive days is considered to be harassment and the caller can be fined. For some products/services customers can specify how many times they want to be contacted and their preferred contact channels.

US ONLY: If you are following all best practices and still being labeled as spam, your best recourse will be to add your numbers to https://freecallerregistry.com/fcr. Here, you can register your phone numbers for legitimate calls to the major US cellular providers. Please note, this process can take a few weeks to complete.