Hanging Up On Dialer Traffic

It’s been almost a year since we posted about Dialer Traffic In the Spotlight. Not much has changed.

Brief calls are a normal part of conversational (human-to-human) telephone traffic. But when short-duration calls DOMINATE the traffic flow from one provider to another, the industry labels it “dialer traffic.” These calls are automatically dialed and often start with a pre-recorded or artificial voice announcement.

This is standard and acceptable practice for notifications like appointment confirmations, flight cancellations, school closings and payment reminders.

Since VSPs get paid by the minute, dialer traffic generally isn’t very profitable. For each of those short calls, the VSPs computers have to do all the same work for call set-up and billing, and yet the revenue per call is miniscule. Making money on dialer traffic alone is difficult. But if you can get a million calls a month, it will add up to $1,000 or more and generates some extra cash for a commissioned salesperson.

If you are a small VSP looking to grow your business, the challenge is that there is not enough legitimate dialer traffic to go around. Having a “dialer deck” as part of your product offering is virtually certain to attract illegal robocallers.

We hear routinely from VSPs that insist they hate illegal robocalls as much as the next guy and want to do everything they can to keep that traffic off their network.

If that’s the case, then to the extent you choose to accept dialer traffic, you have to double down on your vigilance to ensure all those calls are legal. You definitely should have extensive know-your-customer practices and a variety of monitoring tools to watch customer behavior.

But first and foremost, you must ask each of your customers to thoroughly explain and document the details of the traffic they are sending. What sort of campaigns are they (or their customers) running? Reminders? For whom about what? How do they decide what numbers to call? What recording(s) are they playing? Demand and review a checklist of all the applicable rules and regulations and how compliance is ensured. Do these calls require consent? If so, how is it obtained? Via what website(s)? What caller ID value(s) are they using? Are they calling on behalf of another institution? Which one(s)? How can we verify that the proper authorizations have been granted? Every I needs to be dotted and every T crossed. This space is so rampant with fraud and sloppiness that no stone can be left unturned.

These questions apply to intermediate providers as well as end-user callers. The illegal robocall problem won’t be solved if the calls can be trivially laundered through an intermediary. These in-the middle providers need to ask and answer these same questions of THEIR customers. The only thing that prevents them from doing so is they are afraid of the responses they are going to get.

If you aren’t willing to ask these questions, or your customer / prospect isn’t willing to provide credible answers, then you should hang up on the traffic.