How Spam Labeling Is Destroying Answer Rates and Costing Companies Millions

Businesses today are facing increasing obstacles to reaching customers on the phone. Many have responded by upping the number of calls they make to achieve previous answer rates, while the underlying issue remains unaddressed and so continues to grow.

Oftentimes, and unbeknownst to the company, the underlying issue is false spam labeling. Data involving thousands of legitimate businesses shows that one out of four are incorrectly labeled on calls as spam, scam, or fraud, debilitating their answer rates and sales efforts.

And businesses aren’t the only ones affected. Healthcare and survey organizations are also feeling the negative effects of being mislabeled as spam.

Branded Calling, or displaying your company’s or organization’s name/logo/reason for the call, offers a solution that addresses the multi-pronged problem of false spam labeling, which we’ll explore in detail below. It’s also proven to increase answer rates by up to 50% compared to unbranded calls. 

Just How Big Is the Problem?

When it comes to your company’s reputation and profits, having your calls falsely labeled as spam is a big problem. Of companies facing this issue, 81% report direct revenue loss due to being mislabeled as spam/scam, with 15% seeing a loss of over $100,000. 

Most Americans (80%) don’t answer calls from unknown numbers, according to Pew Research, with “Spam Likely” calls having an answer rate of less than 5%. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data mirrors this, showing a 9% answer rate for calls labeled as spam, with a much higher answer rate for unlabeled calls.

Consumers are also suspicious of and less likely to answer calls when the caller ID information is outdated or mismatched, e.g., when it displays “Wireless Caller.”

Even groups with nothing to sell and in full compliance with regulations, such as surveyors and healthcare organizations, are experiencing the repercussions of spam mislabeling, including significant drops in productivity, increased missed appointments, etc.

“The rise of spam flags and automatic blockers is a direct threat to legitimate survey research organizations,” according to an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) committee warning on the unintended consequences of anti‑robocall regimes.

AAPOR further reports that phone-based surveys are seeing lower answer rates and higher costs due to call blocking and spam labeling. The situation is similar for healthcare organizations, who are seeing more “no shows” and weakened patient throughput due to mislabeled spam calls.

The problem for all involved is most likely bigger than the data shows, because blocking is often done “silently” by both carriers and apps through network-level call blocking. In these cases, calls may never show as declined, never show on the handset, or never even ring. 

Because companies and organizations are unaware of the impacts of spam labeling, they often attribute a lower answer rate to a false reason (like script or list quality) or attempt to make up for it by increasing their calls. SalesHive reports that many organizations today have upped their calls by five times, which can in fact just make the problem worse, as we’ll discuss next. 

Common Causes of Spam Labeling

Legitimate companies and organizations often don’t expect to be labeled as spam/scam/fraud, so they don’t consider it a concern. 

However, spam-labeling apps and similar technology tend to err on the side of suspicion rather than neutrality, causing even lawful outreach to be frequently labeled as spam.

Increased Focus on Behavior

In the past, companies got better results from STIR/SHAKEN authentication, but today’s analytics engines focus more on behavior-based spam-flagging, making STIR/SHAKEN a partial, often-ineffective solution. 

Behavior-based flagging includes high-call volumes, short call durations, low answer rates, repetitive redial patterns, and complaint signals. AI-run campaigns are especially susceptible to this type of flagging.

Number-Rotation Risks

Other efforts once seen as a solution have proved today to contribute to the problem. One example is number rotation. These short-lived, high-velocity phone numbers tend to trigger spam-flagging.

Customers’ Perceptions of Spam

Analytics engines are also giving more weight to user-reported spam, even though users might indicate calls as spam simply if they are unbranded/unlabeled, let alone marked as “Spam Likely.”

Even when spam labeling is remedied, poorly run call campaigns can lead to re-labeling in a short period of time—just days or weeks. 

Branded Calling to Address False Spam Labels

Businesses and organizations can improve their answer rate and protect their reputation by addressing mislabeled spam/scam/fraud, but it’s not always clear how to best proceed.

For example, identifying and remediating the issue might be a team’s first step, as this is shown to improve contact rates by 1-5% on average, and by as much as 20-30%. However, if the remedy doesn’t factor in pattern-detection models’ use of behavioral scoring, or how this scoring changes rapidly, the problem will often return, sometimes quickly.

A long-term solution exists, with Branded Calling. Displaying your company’s name/logo/reason for the call goes a long way in getting your calls answered. One 2023 study showed that enterprise campaigns saw up to a 50% improved answer rate after using Branded Calling, versus unbranded calls.

When it comes to your brand’s reputation, you don’t have to have telecom expertise to make your outbound calls a success, but you do need a solution derived from this expertise. Branded Calling provides it.