It’s hard to imagine life without a mobile phone. This “computer in your pocket” has revolutionized our world, by getting us close to the people we love or becoming a tool for work. But what happens when you suddenly get a ton of calls from unwanted telemarketers or even a fraudulent company calls making your phone barely usable? That is a problem of the past, you now see on your phone a label on that incoming call that indicates that you are receiving a “Spam Call”. That is great news. Since most of us, simply will not answer that call.

In technology slang, the term “Spam” refers to all those written and verbal communications whose frequency may be high enough and mostly undesired and unrequested content. It’s not difficult to imagine why email products has that feature built-in into their products. The problem lies that these filters are not 100% effective and, in many cases, some of those emails or calls like in our case are legitimate.  

In the lasts months, the main mobile carriers in the US started using reputation services to mark the incoming phone calls to their subscribers from potential bad actors by tagging them as “Spam Risk, “Telemarketer” or “Political Call”. This gives power to the consumer to decline the call rather that falling into the trap of an unsolicited call.

Like we mentioned earlier, not every “Spam Risk” call you receive is indeed from a bad actor. It could be that a regular company that just has a high volume of outgoing calls, most of them to their own customers and for legitimate business, and these reputation services are mis-labeling these calls as potentially fraudulent. At the end of the day, these services use part AI and part consumer feedback to score the phone number of a given company.

If you are one of these companies whose phone numbers on their VoIP, Hosted PBX, UCaaS, Contact Center or Microsoft Teams service is being affected by these new changes, below are the steps to “clear your name” so to speak and remove this label from your number. Please bear in mind that if you are engaging in unsolicited business, your call with be tagged again.

The following reputation providers: First Orion, Hiya, and Transaction Network Services are the main ones being used by the main US mobile carriers; they provide among others the following services: call blocking, identification, protection against spam risks, protecting the routing of your calls, and allowing your company’s phone numbers to be crossed off the list of spam callers.

This is a solution that benefits consumers, taking into consideration the more than 200 million unwanted daily calls made in the US alone.

Note that even if your company’s phone number(s) are not being mis-labeled as SPAM at the current time, you should take a proactive step and sign up for those services and make sure your numbers are registered. By preventing being mis-labeling as spam risk in the future, you are preventing issues that may affect your sales and services in the future.

Below are instructions on how to sign up with each of the services. You need to sign up and request the removal of spam flags and the correct the listing of your company numbers.

1.    Hiya. Used by AT&T, Cricket, and others. You can submit a ticket with them to update your business name and number. https://hiyahelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=824667

2.    First Orion. Used by T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, boostmobile, Tracphone, and others. https://portal.firstorion.com/app/landing/#/signup.

3.    TNS. Used by Verizon, Sprint, US Cellular, and others. https://reportarobocall.com.

If you are a NextPointe customer, you will not have to worry about this. As part of our managed services, we will work with you and take care of clearing your numbers from this list*. Do you want to enjoy all the advantages and benefits of being a NextPointe customer? Contact us today and experience the NextPointe difference. 

*Provided customer is not engage unsolicited calling activities in their VoIP, Hosted PBX, UCaaS, Contact Center or Microsoft Teams service.