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Phone Banking Deliverability and Best Practices

Updated

Building Effective and Compliant Phone Banking Communities

To create impactful phone banking communities, it’s essential to continuously gather deliberate opt-ins and honor opt-outs. This ensures that your outreach targets familiar audiences who genuinely want to engage with your organization or campaign. These practices not only boost outreach effectiveness but also ensure compliance with regulations.

Why Compliance Matters

Consumers expect relevant, welcome content and protection from spam. Carriers and providers reward organizations that maintain consumer trust and deliver valuable, requested information. Additionally, compliance with legal and regulatory requirements—such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), 10DLC, CCPA, and STIR/SHAKEN—is crucial to safeguarding individuals from unwanted or unsolicited contact.

Carrier Requirements and Industry Standards

Even though phone banking partners using our platform are reputable organizations reaching their audiences, understanding industry standards helps ensure best practices in outreach.

When carriers like AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile flag calls as potential spam, it’s a reflection of how they view the calling number. Carriers prioritize shielding consumers from disruptive or unwanted calls, flagging or blocking numbers that exhibit signs of spam. Low answer rates, calling disconnected numbers, and repeated unwanted calls can signal spam to carriers, leading to blocked numbers or spam designations across networks.

Certain phone banking practices may appear “suspicious” and could cause carriers to flag your number. Here are three common types of behavior to avoid:

  • Extremely short calls, such as disconnecting when reaching voicemail.
  • Low answer rates, often resulting from calling disconnected numbers.
  • Failure to honor opt-outs, which can lead to consumer complaints.

Opting In vs. Opting Out: Key Compliance Distinctions

From a compliance standpoint, understanding the differences between opting in and opting out is essential.

  • Opting in requires individuals to give explicit consent before data collection, processing, or communication occurs. This proactive approach aligns with higher compliance standards and reflects the consumer’s choice to engage.
  • Opting out allows data collection or communication by default, with individuals having the option to withdraw consent later. While acceptable under some regulations, opt-out models are facing increased scrutiny due to privacy concerns.

Best Practices for Managing Consent and Call Usability in the Platform

To maintain a positive caller reputation and minimize the chance of being flagged as spam or blocked, we recommend that all Organizer users adopt the following best practices.

  1. Track both opt-ins and opt-outs directly within the platform: 
    • When importing new phone number records, mark numbers you have consent to contact as Usable. Leave the usability of other numbers as Unknown or Not Usable.
    • Keep your phone number data up-to-date by marking disconnected numbers and individuals who ask to be removed from your list as Not Usable for Calls. This not only matters for honoring consent, but also helps you demonstrate to carriers that you have a high answer rate and deliver wanted communication.
  2. Target individuals with usable numbers: When creating a Community (List or Segment) for phone banking, we recommend reviewing the usability of the phone numbers. Filter for Phone Number Usability is Unknown or Phone Number Usability is Usable in order to filter those profiles with unknown or usable phone numbers. In addition, the phone banking queue takes usability into account when determining which numbers/profiles to keep in the queue. See Preferred Attributes - Phone Numbers and Phone Banking Dispositions for information on how Organizer prioritizes usable numbers.

Auditing and Registering Your Number(s)

In addition to following the above recommended and required best practices for protecting your phone number’s reputation and preventing it from being marked as spam, there are several steps you can take before and after purchasing a number to improve the effectiveness of your outreach:

  1. Check the number’s existing reputation: Before purchasing a phone number, use a free phone number lookup service (you can find several sites to choose from online) to ensure the number doesn’t have an existing reputation as a spam caller built by the last individual or entity who used the number.
  2. Enroll in caller registration services that provide major phone carriers with key data and analytics on legitimate organizations, verified numbers, and spam/scam callers: This enhances your phone number's legitimacy and visibility and contributes to establishing trust with both users and carriers.
  1. Register your number directly with individual carriers: This also helps to build a positive reputation for your phone number.

Note that registering your number(s) and organization with the above caller registration services and individual carriers can take a few weeks to process.