At DialogTech, we’re in the business of helping people connect with their leads and customers. One of the most important things we do is help people who drive leads determine where those leads are coming from. For many businesses, the ability to know which of their campaigns is providing the most value is more than just helpful: it’s a necessity.
So when something happens that interrupts our ability to help get our customers that data, it is a crucial issue for us. Recently, there has been an outburst of activity that has a direct impact on this. What is happening is that there is a party generating short calls (30 seconds or less, generally) with silence on the caller end. This is likely Toll Free Traffic Pumping.
Traffic Pumping happens when a company that carries telephone calls gets paid a large sum to carry traffic to numbers on their systems. Sometimes calls are generated systematically to increase the amount of billable minutes they carry on their systems. You can learn more about this practice from the FCC here.
As you can imagine, this has a direct impact on many of our customers. It can make it more difficult to determine how effective marketing campaigns are, and the people who answer the phones for these calls get frustrated and assume that there is a problem with the phone system.
We are working with our partners to determine the source of this issue. However, this may be a long process, and we may not get to the bottom of it before it dies down. So in addition to that approach, we are evaluating these spam calls to determine any patterns we see that would allow us to block these calls before they get to our customers. As soon as we have a workable solution, we will begin testing to see if it helps.
In the meantime, if you should notice an influx of these calls in your account, there are generally two things that we can do to mitigate this problem.
First, you can use a schedule to send off-hours calls to voicemail. This will stop the calls from being delivered to any businesses when you know they aren’t open.
Secondly, you can easily add an IVR to verify the caller is human. Simple messaging like “Please press 5, so we know you are a human” or something similar has stopped nearly all of these calls from routing in our experience.
Please reach out to our Customer Success Team at 877-295-5100 if you have any questions about this, or think it is impacting your business.