“Couldn’t I monitor my phone numbers? Rotate them? Buy phones to check spam labels myself?”
If you encounter spam labels on your phone calls that shouldn’t be there, they’re likely tarnishing your dealership’s reputation. Your first question would be: How do I fix this? You’re likely not used to dealing with mislabeled phone calls, and you’re likely unaware that they could be blocked altogether. Unless you have a team dedicated to the outbound dialing activities of your dealership, making sure they all remain label-free and successfully delivered to your customers can be a challenging daily task.
The best thing to do is partner with a company that specializes in reputation management and can handle these worries on your behalf. When you start evaluating available options, you’ll likely find confusing amounts of misinformation in the market that will leave you wondering: Well, why can’t I fix my spam labeling issues on my own?
It’s true; there are basic monitoring solutions that can give you some insight into your spam tagging issues, and you could spend the time strategizing on rotating your phone numbers to try and avoid any labels. But this doesn’t guarantee they’ll be label-free or that they won’t be blocked. Plus, you’re probably not as ready or equipped to solve your spam labels as you may think.
If you can track and measure it, you can do something about it. Are you equipped to do that tracking? Can you effectively measure why spam labels are showing up and how they impact your dealership KPIs? You won’t get very far if you’re not confident in how your current methods or platforms deal with spam labeling issues.
- You’ll need to create or invest in a place to view AND manage all your phone numbers across all the major wireless carriers (ideally, a single place/source/platform). It sounds basic, but this is where you must start to manage your clean or spam-tagged phone numbers accurately and successfully.
- Next, you’ll need a place to view AND control your calling campaigns across all the top wireless carriers. This is crucial for the necessary data-gathering to track which calls in which campaigns are being mislabeled as spam to provide needed insights into how you would like to proceed from there.
- The platforms you manage your phone numbers and calling campaigns must be able to report any labeling or mislabeling on your phone numbers across all the major wireless carriers. But reporting alone won’t cut it.
- You need a way to be notified when spam labeling occurs, not when your customers let you know it’s popping up on their phone screens when you call (lucky for you, they picked up and could tell you it was happening). You’ll need the data to be accessible and as updated as possible when you need to check up on your phone numbers and on which carrier it is being labeled.
- Managing your phone numbers and calling campaigns is already a significant investment, not only financially but also in your time and staffing resources. Suppose you were to manage your number reputation (spam labeling) on top of that on your own. You need to ensure your team has the tools and time to keep track of your phone numbers, manage calling campaigns, monitor for any improper spam tags, and mitigate the labels should they arise. Is that a scalable process for you and your team to manage effectively?
Once you have the infrastructure, it’s time to figure out how to fix any spam or scam tags harming your calls. If you’re attempting to do this alone, this means going directly through each major wireless carrier. Here’s what you’d need to fix just one spam label on one phone number (keep in mind that removing more negative tags, like fraud labels, is typically denied):
- Each carrier has its own support process for submitting spam labeling appeals. If your phone number shows up as “Spam Likely” via one carrier, it may be delivered as something similar, like “Potential Spam,” on another. You’ll need insight, relationships, or direct access to each carrier independently.
- From there, you’ll need to consider the following factors when submitting a support ticket to the carriers to remediate or fix a spam label (please note that the following data is based on averages for submitting one phone number):
- It can take up to 30 minutes to submit the necessary information in a support ticket to a carrier (up to 90 minutes across all three major wireless carriers), and it often requires several emails back and forth to get everything needed for the remediation process.
- It varies by carrier, but the data that is typically required for remediation includes the phone number, the root entity caller and/or the brand entity caller, what rating or label your call was scored with, your contact information, and sometimes, a screenshot of how your call delivered the device.
- It can take up to 5 business days to receive any kind of response from the carrier, whether positive or negative, about your support ticket. If the number gets denied remediation, more actions are required from there.
- Once you submit a support ticket to the carriers, there is a 0% guarantee that the spam label will be corrected. Can you afford to wait this long, with such low odds, for just one spam label?
- With 25% of a business’ phone calls typically at risk for spam labeling events, you’ll likely have more than one label to mitigate. If you’re a heavy dialer, we’d recommend doing the math on how many phone numbers 25% represents for you. Can you handle that volume of support tickets?
More needs to be factored into an independent strategy besides daily monitoring numbers and submission of support tickets. A successful number reputation management solution will also need to consider the following steps in an ongoing fashion:
- If you’re not sure how current the monitoring data you’re receiving is, many buy test phones to ensure the labels on phone screens are accurate. If you want total visibility and certainty, you may consider investing in mobile devices, each with its cell plan across all the top wireless carriers. How many phones would you need to invest in, depending on the volume of phone numbers and calls you make? Or what mechanisms do you have in place that provide the certainty you need to trust the data?
- Suppose you decide that rotating or swapping numbers is how you want to try and avoid spam labels. In that case, you must ensure you’re doing so in a compliant and respectful way because the algorithms are looking for that type of avoidant and sometimes suspicious behavior.
- If you’re dialing at high volumes, you must have adequate resources to handle rotating and swapping that many phone numbers successfully.
- Does your team feel confident and well-equipped to track all spam tagging to make the appropriate number swaps, support ticket submissions, and call campaign strategies in an insightful and actionable manner?
- Do you know how to stay updated with the latest compliance expectations for your dialing practices, which are constantly changing? Do you know which dialing patterns may lead to negative call labels?
- Can you accept that “new” phone numbers are not likely “new,” just new to you, and might come with baggage inherited from their previous users? Some percentage of numbers you add into your rotation are likely already at risk before you even start dialing.
- Decisions are happening at the regulatory level that impact your calls. With standards and technologies constantly evolving with the carriers and the delivery of call traffic, you must have someone who can stay on top of the latest regulatory matters affecting your business each month.
Choosing to monitor and manage the reputation of your phone numbers independently means that 0% of your phone numbers are protected, so you have to monitor 100% of them 100% of the time. Are you confident and well-equipped enough to handle that? With the steps listed above as the minimum required for successful number reputation management on your own, not to mention how costly it is, it’s time to consider a better fit for your dealership.
Dealer Identity provides the only platform in the Automotive Industry to manage all the steps listed above, like submitting remediation requests to the carriers and keeping you updated on dialing strategies, all in one place via our aggregated platform. We not only work to remove the barriers getting in the way of you reaching your customers, but we also protect your calling identity as a trusted source and empower you to have control and visibility over your communications.
