The Problem With Spam

Collection agents have a legitimate reason to make calls, and reach people.  However, with modern smart phones and email services, there are a lot of screening tools to take out the spam.  Time share opportunities in Mexico, glow in the dark shoelaces, Nigerian princes bequeathing us millions of dollars -- and those should be screened out.

But collection agencies often get lumped in with the spam screening.

Why?  Because consumers flag us as spam, and it propagates.

Your collection agency collectively calls, let's say, 4000 customers manually.  And 400 of those are on AT&T, and 40 of those consumers are disgruntled, and mark your number as spam -- now everyone who you call for the next day or week will show up as "Probable Spam Call".

This also happens with SMS and emails too.  Just recently we had a very big surge of new business assigned all within a day or two, and we sent out the initial collection notices by email as allowed in British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia -- and because our daily outbound email volume tripled that day, and some folks marked us as spam, we were blocked by Outlook.com for 24 hours, requiring our IT folks to report we were a legitimate source and do all sorts of running around.

So what can you do about it?  Here are some best practices:

* Just because you can do high volume communication, don't.  Make your call, email, and texting strategies meaningful.  Don't just crank up the volume of contact attempts, it will hurt you more than hinder you.

* Don't put all your eggs in one basket -- don't have everyone call out from a single toll free number, give each of your staff their own personal DIDs, so if you do get flagged as spam calling, it's just one or two of your team, not the whole company.

* Have redundant processes -- if a critical communication channel does get blocked, have a backup plan, a different VOIP provider, a different SMS gateway -- something you can use while your hard-working IT folks get you unblocked, which may take some time.

* Have a social media presence.  If you can put up a staff page with a team member's toll free number and name, if someone googles the number on their call display, they'll see you are a legitimate company calling them -- and it reduces slightly the odds of someone marking you as spam.

There's more you can do -- STIR/SHAKEN protocols, reporting to certain gateways proactively, email server settings ... but this is a good start.

Recently, I was on a webcast for AccountsRecovery.net, and I touched on this.

20250721 - BDW_ Drop in right party contacts

Anyone got some extra best practices to share?  Drop me a note to blair@receivableaccounts.com.

Thanks kindly,

Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com