5 Expert Strategies to Combat Scam Likely + Must Have Tech – Webinar Recap

Are you losing leads to spam likely labels or worried your marketing campaigns are being flagged as scams?

In a recent webinar, industry experts discussed the most effective tools and strategies to combat the ongoing issue of spam flags or “scam likely” labels that plague marketing and sales calls.

The panel was hosted by Mike Gibb from LeadGenBulletin.com and featured experts:

• John Henson, Attorney at Troutman Amin

• Michael Peronto, Director of Professional Services at Active Prospect

• Daniel Foppen, VP of Product & Product Marketing at Convoso

Check out the highlights below or catch the full conversation to learn how to combat spam and scam labeling and ensure your calls connect.

Consumers receive 2.3 billion spam or unwanted calls per month—about seven per customer per month—so it’s understandable that the FCC is cracking down on this. The FCC chairwoman has repeatedly stated that her top consumer protection priority is ending robocalls.

Unfortunately, as the rules become stricter, they frequently penalize legitimate businesses by falsely labeling their numbers as spam or scam calls. These flags make customers much less inclined to answer these calls, and you can’t sell to customers who won’t pick up the phone.

The financial impact of flagged numbers is staggering, with 70% of webinar attendees reporting losses between $100,000 and $500,000 a year.

Each carrier has its own guidelines and algorithms for identifying potential spam calls, so there are no clear rules you can follow to completely eliminate this problem. Instead, the goal is to learn how to reduce the number of flagged calls as much as possible.

To ensure your calls reach their intended recipients and avoid being flagged as spam, it's essential to implement effective strategies. Here are five key practices to help maintain your caller ID reputation and improve your contact rates.

One sure way to get your numbers flagged is to contact customers who don’t want to hear from you. That’s why it’s essential to get explicit consent before contacting leads. Starting January 27, 2025, new FCC rules require you to get one-to-one consent for calls.

Peronto said that it’s also critical to avoid contacting significantly aged leads without getting their consent again. If a customer filled out a contact request form 200 days ago, they aren’t likely to remember your company or that they asked you to contact them. This can lead them to report your number as spam, which will cause carriers to flag it.

Another critical measure is ensuring all phone numbers display your company’s name. “Make sure that [prospects] know who's calling. If they don't know who's calling…87% of US residents are not answering calls that are not appropriately identified,” Peronto said. Properly identified calls are also less likely to be marked as spam.

Don’t frustrate prospects by contacting them constantly. “You should treat your customers like people, meaning that you shouldn't be calling people six, seven times a day,” Peronto said. “If you’re spamming them over and over again on a daily basis, they’re going to register you as a spammer. That's going to be picked up in the analytics by those carriers, as well as third-party providers.”

Peronto shared a little-known tip for mitigating spam flags: sign up with the Free Caller Registry. This service submits your data to the three major providers of call management services. Some carriers and third-party applications check this database to help determine if numbers are legitimate.

Another essential tip Peronto shared is to ensure you’re registered appropriately for STIR/SHAKEN. “There are some organizations that are out there that still haven't done this to this day,” he said. “If you do not have that done…then you’re going to have a much harder time with delivery of phone calls.”

When one of your numbers is flagged as spam, be proactive about disputes. This involves working with carriers and third-party applications by providing the necessary paperwork to demonstrate that the calls are legitimate.

“It’s a long process,” Peronto said. Thankfully, there are tools available that can do this work for you, eliminating the time-consuming manual processes and reducing the stress associated with them.

Advanced technology is critical to combat spam and scam likely labels, reducing the need for time-consuming manual efforts. The right tools help your business monitor and manage caller ID reputations to ensure your team reaches prospects and generates revenue.

With the right technology, you can automatically monitor phone number performance and receive alerts when a number is flagged. Monitoring tools identify flagged numbers and take them out of rotation promptly to maintain contact rates without the need for constant manual oversight.

But how many phone numbers do you need for an effective rotation?

“Before the age of good monitoring tools, the rule [for how many numbers you needed] was basically to double your numbers. But that’s a costly game, because you’re just buying a bunch of extra numbers that you're rotating without actually having control of the situation,” Foppen said.

“We see that with a good monitoring tool, like Convoso’s ClearCallerID, you can bring it down to maybe a 20% increase [in the amount of numbers you need] because you will still get some flagging and have to take a number out of rotation. That’s a much more effective way to deal with that.”

Look for a monitoring tool that offers automated remediation, meaning it identifies flagged numbers, takes them out of rotation, and rests or re-registers them. This maintains campaign momentum by reducing disruptions and eliminates manual monitoring and remediation tasks.

While you can manually monitor and remediate flagged numbers, it’s a massive time investment and almost impossible to do at scale. “It’s easier if you just pay for the service,” Peronto said. “That service, if you're making a large amount of outbound calls regularly for your business, is worth every penny.”

Carriers use algorithms to help identify potential spam or scam calls. “Just think about what an algorithm is going to recognize,” Foppen said. “If you place a call at 1:00, then 1:05, 1:10, and 1:15, that’s a super repetitive pattern. That’s obviously going to [seem like] an automated robo kind of system.”

You also have to look at how many dials you have per day for a number and the length of those calls. “When you start getting in excess of 200 dials a day for a phone number, there’s going to be a much higher likelihood for you to be flagged for spam,” Peronto said. “If your phone's only ringing for 15 seconds or 10 seconds and those are happening back to back in a dialer, that number is probably going to get flagged as spam.”

With advanced dialing technology, you can set irregular call patterns that don’t look automated, which reduces the chances of a carrier labeling your number as spam. It’s also important to gradually increase call volumes when starting a campaign.

“If all of a sudden you start a campaign, and you've got a new caller ID and you're starting from scratch and it makes 500 phone calls, that's going to get flagged. You want to slowly build it up over time,” Peronto said. Smart dialer software can help you do this, ensuring that you don’t exceed thresholds that trigger spam alerts.

The landscape of call center operations and spam flagging is evolving, and while it may become less of a burden as algorithms advance, it isn’t going to completely disappear.

“I think in the long term, it's going to get better…As providers and contact centers use their own analytics and they get better and better, then I think some of that [flagging] will be cut down. But it’s not going away…when you’ve got this government agency that wants to stop all robocalls. Good actors are going to get caught up in the net take.” Henson said.