Understanding why your number is displaying as Spam:

Maintaining a good phone reputation has become increasingly critical as scams and robocalls have caused more people to screen their calls before answering than ever before. A call’s reputation displayed to a mobile user in the form of a Scam or Spam label is the result of reputational analytics that take into account several factors around your phone number. One such factor is flags placed on your number from Phone Carriers after enough people have reported your number as spam.

Carriers also often pay close attention to the number of calls a phone number makes within a given time. For example, placing more than 100 calls from the same number within 24 hours is likely to get that number flagged. Carriers know that humans cannot realistically place this many calls in one day, so they assume the calls are being made by software.

Our communication provider, Twilio, has outlined their recommendations and best practices for maintaining a positive caller reputation in this article from their help center.

Additional steps you can take to improve the likelihood of your calls being answered

Register your CNAM with Carriers:

Caller ID Name (CNAM) is a service used in telephone networks to provide the name of the calling party. Registering your phone numbers’ CNAM data ties these numbers to your business data.

Each time a phone carrier receives a call, it checks known CNAM databases for the calling party’s phone number. If a match is found, the data is displayed on the recipient’s device, increasing their trust in the source of the number and their likelihood of answering.

Please contact support with the CNAM you would like us to register on your behalf.

Note: The CNAM can be a business or person, represented as a string of text no longer than 15 characters. CNAM cannot start with a number - it should begin with a letter and can only contain letters, numbers, periods, commas and spaces. Example: Groove

Register your Phone Numbers with SHAKEN/STIR Trusted Calling

The SHAKEN/STIR framework is designed to validate that an incoming call is from a source authorized to use that number, as opposed to a bad actor who is illegally spoofing a phone number they don’t have the authorization to use or display. When adopted, carriers can present a trust indicator, like “Caller Verified,” to recipients’ phones.

Groove registers all of our Dialer customer’s phone numbers with Twilio’s SHAKEN/STIR Trusted Calling upon onboarding to the Dialer.

Register your Phone Numbers with the Free Call Registry (FCR)

Ultimately, terminating call carriers seem to play the biggest role in whether calls are labeled as spam or not. One proactive or reactive step to decrease the chances one’s phone number surfaces with a spam label is to register one’s numbers directly with terminating call carriers.

There are three main cellular network providers in the United States.

1. First Orion

2. Hiya

3. TNS Call Guardian

These three providers created Free Call Registry (FCR), https://freecallerregistry.com/fcr/, as a one-stop shop where people can register their numbers to all three carriers at once. Similar to setting up a SHAKEN/STIR, this process serves to validate to carriers the identity of the caller and the caller’s right to use the phone number.

Please reach out to support@groove.co to request a CSV list of the active phone numbers that you would like to submit to the FCR.

Final Note on Avoiding Numbers Displaying as Spam

The steps outlined above can boost phone number(s) immunity to being flagged as spam algorithmically; however, if there is heavy incidence of those same phone number(s) being manually reported as spam by call recipients, these numbers are still liable to receive spam labels again in the future. Thus it is vital that users are adhering to appropriate calling behavior and not engaging in spam-like behavior.