How Can Blood Centers Improve Outbound Call Deliverability?
With less and less people answering the phone compared to several years ago, it’s more imperative than ever to focus on ensuring outbound calls are delivered to the intended recipient with a proper business name label. It’s also equally essential to ensure that spam labeling and blocking are minimized, as well as maintaining compliance withDNC, TCPA and other relevant compliance requirements. This blog details call deliverability tactics that can help increase contact rate with blood donors, ultimately increasing your blood donations.
Industry Best Practices
There are several methods for maintaining healthy call deliverability, including:
Call Traffic and Volume Management
Caller ID Registrations
Caller ID Monitoring
Caller ID Labeling Remediation
Incept utilizes a combination of all the above items to ensure outbound calls are delivered at the highest rate possible, with proper labeling – increasing the answer rate of calls.
Call Traffic
In the past, this was one of the only methods to attempt to decrease likelihood of blocking or labeling. This strategy is intended to not use suspicious traffic behaviors that carriers are looking for that spammers and bots would typically employ. Too many calls from the same caller ID in a short period of time can lead to the phone number being flagged. On higher volume campaigns, Incept utilizes more caller IDs to reduce the total dials with a caller ID for the day, as well as reduce the frequency of dials for a single caller ID over time periods – by rotating and assigning a pool of caller IDs for records in the campaign.
Caller ID Registrations
Caller Name Delivery (CNAM) is a technology that carriers use to look-up and deliver a 15-character caller ID displayed on inbound calls. Various public entities keep a database of name records associated with phone numbers. Monitoring and remediation services described below attempt to address CNAM issues at the major carrier level, as it is possible that carriers contain out of date information from the public databases. Incept ensures all caller IDs purchased by us have CNAM registration setup and monitoring services enabled with our numbers to ensure the correct outbound caller ID name is displayed to the recipient.
In 2021, the FCC created new standards called STIR/SHAKEN. This is a carrier-based Caller ID authentication standard that helps verify that a call is in fact from the number displayed on the Caller ID and not spoofed. STIR/SHAKEN technology helps ensure calls are coming from whom they say they are and reduce fraudulently spoofed calls. There are various attestation levels given by originating carriers, with “A” level being the highest and most trusted. Incept works directly with our originating carriers to register caller IDs to provide “A” level attestation in the STIR/SHAKEN protocol to reduce likelihood of call labeling and call blocking by destination carriers.
Caller ID Reputation Monitoring
Caller ID reputation monitoring is the process and technology to identify call labeling, call blocking and brand/name display at the carrier level. This technology provides Incept actionable intelligence to address likely call labeling and blocking, as well as incorrect CNAM display. Incept utilizes a 3rd party monitoring service to actively test caller IDs and based on provided insight and other call analytics, trigger remediation as described below. Caller ID monitoring is for call labeling, call blocking, and matching brand display name versus the intended display based on CNAM registration.
Caller ID Reputation Remediation
For items detected when monitoring data, there are processes with each major carrier to remediate incorrect spam labeling and blocking. This process is unique and driven by each carrier. Remediation entails registering the caller ID and asking for current spam labeling to be removed. While this doesn’t guarantee that a label will be removed, or will not recur in the future, Incept continues to actively monitor our clients’ caller ID reputation.
If the remediation is not successful or recurs in the future, Incept will take one or more actions to address this – change frequency of use, rotate out of use temporarily, or rotate out of use permanently. The same trusted 3rd party service providing the monitoring for Incept, also handles the carrier level remediation and provides advice to other best practices or actions if labeling continues to occur.
Branded Caller ID
In addition to the methods above, there is a newer offering on the market referred to as “Branded Caller ID”. This service, while provided by a few 3rd parties, is driven primarily by the major US cellular providers. The service is the ability to register a caller ID and brand name, up to 32 characters, that will be displayed on the end user’s device – with claims of guarantee of no spam labeling or flagging, and proper display of the brand name.
Currently, this technology is only supported on 2 of the 3 major carriers. While this is likely, at least in the short term, to not be a replacement to the strategies described above, we have used Branded Caller ID as part of an integrated and focused strategy. Our tests have shown that Branded Caller ID gets mixed results - on one hand, when you do talk to someone, they are more likely to donate. On the other hand, less people pick up the phone overall when using branded caller ID. This is why we suggest an integrated and focused strategy using Branded Caller ID for your highest value donors or when you have a blood appeal.
Conclusion
As Incept has been in the outbound calling space for almost 30 years, we have continually invested in technology and process improvement to ensure our outbound calls are delivered in the manner that provides the highest likelihood that the intended recipient will answer the call. We feel that the current strategy with actionable intelligence provides a way to both be proactive and reactive to call deliverability – in addition to the experience of our staff to take the intelligence and provide actions as part of overall campaign strategies for our clients. We also understand that this is an evolving landscape and continue to look for ways to improve this.