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. Salesmsg has compiled a list of recommendations and best practices to maintain a positive caller reputation, minimize being blocked or flagged as spam, and improve answer rates.

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.
Provide a number and/or contact information that called parties can use to report alleged violations.

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 use case.

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.