Molly Weis: Hello everybody and welcome to Tuesday Talks, a live discussion series where we bring truth and shed light across the brand identity and communications industry. I am Molly Weis, the VP of Marketing and Communications at Numeracle. I will be co-hosting today's session with our VP of Business Development, Alex Carter. Welcome back to the podcast, Alex.
Alex Carter: Thanks Molly, thanks for having me.
Molly Weis: Great to have you. We're happy to be back here. Today, we are talking about the state of the reputation management landscape. What's changed here? What stayed the same? We've been talking about this for a few years now. Alex and I have been on the podcast talking about this before and there are some things that have been kind of constant throughout all of this and there's some new stuff that's popped up. We want to kind of take today to go through a bit of all of it. I'm thinking it makes sense for us to start at the beginning. Let's do a reminder here for those on the line. What are the origins and significance of call blocking and labeling? What is the impact of all of this? How does this influence reputation management?
Alex Carter: I think it's important to start with where everything was created. Back in around 2018, there was a large study commissioned to see how bad the dialing for dollars and defraud programs were. How bad is this impacting everyday Americans? Long story short, the study found that annually about $30 billion was being defrauded from the American public through these bad actor voice call scams where they'll try to grab your credit card or have you divulge some personal information that allows them to get money from you. The FCC and FTC put together the TRACED Act. It's a regulation body that basically contains the Know Your Customer laws. All of this was very well-intentioned. Fast forward to today, which is the reason why you'll see "Scam Likely" pop up on your cell phone when someone's calling because the true, honest, good intent was for the telephone companies to warn the consumers that there's a call that's coming in that's got some sketchiness around it, so be careful when you answer this phone call. Just to give a little background on the infrastructure, the carriers obviously got this regulation and said, "Wow, this is a lot, how are we going to manage that?" They've got some trusted partners in their ecosystem, large data analytic companies that use sophisticated and, we'll call them, secret or proprietary computer algorithms that analyze the traffic as it's coming through. It looks for bad behavior and bad patterns, but they keep that all under lock and key because obviously, you don't want the bad guys to get a hold of that because they're going to figure out a way to get around it and then keep defrauding consumers that are out there.
Molly Weis: With all of this now, where does KYC come into play and that's related to the TRACED Act, right?
Alex Carter: That's a great question. Most of the people we know are already programmed into our phones. So, we know when our friends are calling, we know when our family is calling, our doctors, our businesses, things that we find most important. But there are a lot of things that it sure would be nice if we knew who else was calling. So that's what KYC does, it provides a framework that says, okay, you're a business, go ahead and legitimize your business. Get a digital identity that we can pass up into the carrier ecosystem or the network that says this is, indeed, Numeracle or the Home Depot or whoever that is calling, and these are, in fact, the phone numbers that they own and they're allowed to use for whatever purposes that they want to use. In following that set of guidelines and infrastructures, it gives those analytic companies that I spoke about and the carriers, what they really want and that is to trust the traffic, to be able to trust your identity, to trust your phone numbers. So don't get so concerned with the shiny bells and whistles quite yet on showing a brand or anything. The first thing you got to do is let the network know that you're a legitimate business, these are your phone numbers and you're calling for very specific reasons and we don't want that to show up as a spam problem.
Molly Weis: Gearing up for this Tuesday Talks today, I was talking to one of our other favorite Tuesday Talks cohosts, Pierce Gorman, asking him what his take was on all this, too. He shared something that I'm not going to be able to say better myself. So we're going to quote the famous Pierce Gorman and say that to add to what you said, Alex, KYC is important for at least two other reasons here on top of all this, which is, number one, making it more difficult for bad actors to be undetected and anonymous when they apply for any service, right? And number two, making it easier to help the good actors, like all the people that we're here to be able to help self-identify, to improve avoidance and remediation of accidental labeling and blocking that they're going to run into because that's just the nature of the beast right now. All this to say, from the introduction of call blocking and labeling to where we are right now, thinking about why all of this is happening, why are these algorithms even out there? And thinking about the original purpose being the carriers and all the folks out there who need to conduct KYC, it's always been the desire and the responsibility of this ecosystem to protect the subscribers on the networks from getting fraudulent calls. Meanwhile, we're here trying to find ways to protect the legitimate businesses, all the legal good guys out there who are running into issues where their traffic, which just happens to look exactly like all the illegal robocall traffic. Everybody's using the same network. It's all blended together. Here's something that hasn't changed, the network is always working to make these algorithms better. They're trying to get the best information they can. They're trying to use validated, vetted, KYC-based information to know who people are in the network. There are always sketchy people that are floating around in there doing the next big scam. We see this all the time. Just last month, there was another cease and desist out there, a big insurance scam that was identified and shut down. So, this is happening. We are using these technologies to be able to identify some of these bad actors. In the meantime, the scam is continuing to increase. We saw T-Mobile put out a statistic, a 75% increase in scam attacks just on their network alone, and that was in 2022. So, we're seeing this too, Alex, right? Internally, with all the customers that we're helping try to navigate around this, we're seeing the need for remediation just continue to increase exponentially.
Alex Carter: Yeah. And the fact of the matter is the bad guys aren't going away, right? They're always going to find and they're always going to try, but that doesn't stop the intention of the ability to do everything in our power to keep the fraud at an absolute minimum, while at the same time, like you said, trying to protect legitimate businesses so they can still conduct economies legally through voice calls.
Molly Weis: It has always been and continues to be very difficult to navigate all this. Let's talk a little bit about some of that with some of the strategies that have been in place from the beginning, still in place now. Some new stuff right off the bat since the last time you and I were on Tuesday Talks, talking about this, talking about how we evaluate the market out there and what you need to do to find a solution. There are new providers out there. What's your initial high-level assessment of what we're seeing newer to the market these days?
Alex Carter: So, we'll cover that in one second. I neglected to mention one of the things that we measure is being able to gauge how much of this traffic and how serious it is, how many times. We obviously have visibility, and a lot of providers like us out there have visibility into the rate at which the numbers go from being clean over to being tagged. From 2021 to 2022, we had an increase of about 61% in the likelihood that numbers were being spam tagged. As of right now, and we're about halfway through this year, we're seeing another increase of about 150%-160%. That's just for everybody that's out there that's thinking this problem is going to go away. Actually, it's not. It's increasing. As you had mentioned, they're constantly in there tweaking these algorithms, trying to find a better way. They're trying to do the right thing and keep the bad guys out. Unfortunately, some of the side effects are that it tags legitimate business numbers. Being able to have a way to go through that is still step number one. You've got to be able to know if this stuff is impacting you. Especially since we don't see that rate of increase going down, it's exponentially going up. To your point, this has caused a lot of new entrants that have come into the market that provide services, but they're kind of scattered. We've spoken about this previously, some of them only just offer a simple visibility. Like, go put a phone number in here and check it, right? That's one thing that you can have. Then there are others out there that will take it all the way to actually remediating the bad phone number and then fixing that phone number and then laying on additional types of services after that. Of course, there's the free option too. You can always go to like a free call registry and do that, but there are no guarantees with that. It doesn't update. So, you could go in there today for free, you could register your telephone numbers, then the algorithms will change tomorrow, and then it'll be like you've done absolutely nothing. It'll be right back to square one and you'll have to go back in and redo it. It can get confusing and you're going to have to be proactive and go after that. Nothing's going to notify you that one of your numbers is being labeled. Whereas some providers will be proactive and they will tell you that, and they will even go as to far as to say, "Don't worry about it, I got it, we're going to fix it for you." A day goes by, a day and a half goes by, and they get a little ping that says you're all good to go. If it gets swept up in another algorithm again, we'll take care of it for you.
Molly Weis: So, the free caller registry is reminding me, is there some movie about this guy where every day he wakes up and forgets who he was and he has to figure it out all over again?
Alex Carter: It might have something to do with a little puppy groundhog or something, no idea.
Molly Weis: But it's making me feel this way, right? Because it is like you can go put your phone numbers on a free call registry and that's maybe going to do something. It's a great proactive step, right? It might do something for a very short period of time, but they're not looking at it every day. It's not something that's like the whitelist or a registry of the vetted information. Because also, can't anybody just go on these things and say "I'm whatever business, and this is my number?" Is anybody vetting that? No. So, herein lies the problem. You can't really influence the way your calls are going to be delivered or take real control of your identity unless anybody actually knows what your identity is. It's part of a larger guessing game, and it depends on what your goals are here, right? I think if your goals are to influence and impact the way your calls are being displayed and delivered, you must go through some process to let the carrier ecosystem know who you are, have that confidence in who you are, and to even agree that, yes, this is a good actor. Yes, of course, I don't want to mistakenly block or label this hospital's phone numbers. Of course, I don't want to be doing that, right? It's always going to be a balancing act that's always been there, and that's always going to be there. No matter how many new solutions come into the market to try to offer new and novel ways in and around it or through it, that's always going to be the key, is letting people know who you are. That's what consumers want too. All they ever wanted was more transparency, and to see who's calling them anyway. We're here trying to help provide that, all of us together. I wanted to ask you about one of the newer entrants to the market we're seeing now. Speed is everything, right? And when solutions first came about, it was like a lot of static reporting out there. Now there are a lot of more sophisticated things flying around, including solutions like real-time information of exactly how your calls are being displayed at any moment all the time. What's your take on these things? Do those exist? Are they real? What are they best used for?
Alex Carter: There are a variety of options here. Again, there are a couple of different ways that vendors and solution providers can skin a cat with that. There are API methods that they'll show you with predictive screenshots, but then there are actual, what they call device clouds. Just imagine a bank of phones sitting there, and calls are actually made up through the networks and then placed down onto those phones, and then a screen capture is taken of those. That is an exact route, right? That is one that's showing you exactly which device and which network. So, you just went through Verizon and you terminated onto an iPhone, or you just went through AT&T and you terminated onto an Android type of phone that gives you the real perspective of what that looks like. What you have to think about on this is, is this something I really, really need? Is this something I need to pay for? If that's all you really want, that's a fairly low-cost option where you can go in and you can just check it, but you just don't care to do anything about it. However, if you are reliant on voice calls for the economies of your business or if you're a healthcare provider and people need to show up for their appointments, you're going to want to look at the entire solution; a solution that not only monitors but remediates your numbers It's important to ask that question when you're out there shopping; I appreciate that you have a tool that shows me exactly what my brand is displaying as which numbers are displaying as spam. If it says spam, what can you do to help me with that? The idea here is to get with a provider that can take you from point A automatically all the way to cleaning it up and making sure that it's back to where customers aren't seeing a bad or a negative impression on the phone.
Molly Weis: That really is the point here. Identifying a problem is part of an overall solution here. Do you want to do anything about it once you've identified it? That's really where a big differentiator lies. This is good counsel here. I think another good how-are-my-calls-being-displayed type of question here is what about some other new workarounds? Branding came out around last year and it started to become really exciting. An awesome way to let people know who you are when you're calling is to stick your name on the call. This makes sense. We get a lot of questions now asking about this whole branding thing, does that just abolish spam and scam labeling? Is it just overridden? Does it get rid of it? Is it the answer? Like, we just start to brand everything and suddenly we don't have any more problems where balance lies with that? And what should you do if you're kind of thinking about this? Are there kind of some gotcha moments there or what's your take?
Alex Carter: The market has done a good job of confusing buyers out there, ones that are looking to add a branded call or add a logo or a brand name to a call. It certainly does help mitigate spam butt you're still going to have to do the reputation management aspects before that because none of the carriers are going to let you anywhere near a branded call unless they know you're legitimate. There have been some scares recently or some cease and desist letters that have gone out that we've published some information around o those carriers, they just don't want a bad actor. That's what can happen with branding. It can make it so much easier for a bad guy to steal from you. If you saw a legitimate business like your credit card name on there, but it's actually a fraudulent actor, you're more likely to give them your information because it looks legitimate on the phone. Don't be enamored or I guess bedazzled by branded calling, there's a time and there's a place for it. I think what you have to think about the most with branded calling is it's a newer product. It comes with a price per call that is decently, expensive, okay? And you guys can shop around and get proposals for that, but what you need to really consider is whether or not it will be a beneficial return on investment for the business. Because we've done a good handful of implementations and there are use cases that are an absolute slam dunk. There are some healthcare use cases. There are some service delivery use cases. There are ones where people go on and fill out a web form that says, I want you to call me because I want you to come clean my gutters or do something like that. There are absolute slam dunks for that. Then, there are also other use cases where people will brand a call three or four times and nobody's answering that phone call, but you're paying for that impression that's on there. There are a variety of things you need to look at. Now, most importantly, since we sell in all different vertical markets and industries, it's kind of hard to give one magic bullet. But the one that's close enough is if you track your revenue per connected call as a business or if you track, for instance within healthcare, if you track your no-show rate per connected call, that can give you a good idea that you need to start with reputation management. I'll wait 30 days. Here's my baseline on revenue per connected call or whatever that is. Then, I'll go ahead and I'll start layering that in, and let's see if that return on investment indeed pays for itself, if not, provides a profit.
Molly Weis: Thinking about that, you're likely looking at always, I mean, like you said, there's no silver bullet solution, right? We're always going to be talking about how you really establish trust in your identity. We're always going to be talking about what the reputation looks like and the path to branding. Branding is great when it makes sense. As you said, there are a ton of really amazing use cases, but at the end of the day, bad actors can't get in there. So there's going to always be that level of vetting. This is not going away.
Alex Carter: Exactly. As you're shopping around, or if you're looking for a solution, providers really dig in when it comes to branding. It's not just an on-or-off switch, right? You have options, right? You can test it on a particular network, you could test it on a particular set of DIDs, right? Just be aware that there are vendors and there are companies out there that say it's not a do-everything-and-go, you can ease into this and we can provide, or a lot of vendors can provide best practice calling strategies. They can provide strategies on taking a step-by-step approach to enabling your branded calling instead of just flipping a switch and turning it all on and spending a ton of money and then waiting to see if that ends up paying for itself.
Molly Weis: And probably, I mean it's newer, right? So, you're going to really need to as an organization determine what that testing regimen is. A/B testing, trying it on certain campaigns, turning it on, turning it off, each of the carrier networks is different. The display of your calls is going to be different as well and it depends on what type of handset you're calling. So, there are a lot of variables. It's really difficult to build a very structured case without really looking through each and every one of these factors that's going to impact the end result. And what is that result? Are you looking for just an increase in contact rates? And that's really all you're after? Are you looking at the overall? Are you interested in callbacks? Maybe not even on the same day, but just in general, do you want to save your agents time? Are you looking for a higher conversion rate? And what exactly is your use case? Back to your other point, are people actually wanting to hear from you or not? That's always part of this too. I mean, best dialing practices and we have been here talking about number reputation for over five years and something that's never changed is the fact that what you're doing has an impact. No amount of whitelisting, that you know doesn't exist, or anything else you do-- you still can't turn around and just call people 100 times a day and not expect something bad to happen. So, that's always going to be there and I think consumer choice continues to impact the trajectory of where this all goes. Perhaps Alex will be back on Tuesday Talks next year and we'll be talking about this again. What's different? I think we can expect that the proposed rulemaking around this industry is going to always continue to influence this. We're never going to be able to get away from the original purpose of call blocking and labeling, which was that consumers want more information about who is calling them and they don't want to be bothered by people that they don't want to hear from. On this note, the FCC has a comment date set for the next new proposed rulemaking. This is about consent under the TCPA. These proposed new rules are here to strengthen consumers ability to revoke consent that maybe they did give before, to receive robocalls, whatever that means. And robotexts. What does this all have to do with any of this, right? We always need to remind ourselves that the regulatory landscape is here and we're right in the middle of it. This all is going to go hand in hand. This is all about consumer choice and what they want to see on their cell phones. And that the carrier's ability to deliver the best they can to the consumers that are paying to be on their networks and businesses' ability to navigate this in the meantime, to connect with these people who are on these cell networks. I think we're down to the last minute, here, but for anybody listening out there wondering what is the most important element for them to continue to think about and understand here when they're trying to decide what to do about all of this, what does the enterprise focus on right now with the limited energy that they have?
Alex Carter: I think you're asking a two-part question. What I'll do is I'll boil it all down into one thing. If you are running a business, you've spent considerable investment dollars on a dialing platform, on people to answer the phone, on your products, and on your services. Think of all of the money that's been invested to run that business only to have your reputation show up on a Caller ID as "scam likely" for less than a sub-penny phone call, right? For that to be the problem, where it's a fixable solution that's all based on trusting your identity in the ecosystem and registering your phone numbers. You've got to look at protecting the major, major investments that you put in because if you do all of that and your first impression to a million callers out there that you're calling for whatever reason or your local healthcare system and it shows up as "scam likely?" It's not worth it, right? Fixing your reputation, that's the key if you see "spam likely" on your Caller ID and that's important to you, that's when you need to fix it.
Molly Weis: Well said, Alex. Well, I'm going to thank you for joining us again here on Tuesday Talks. Alex, it's been awesome to be back together with you again. It's been wonderful. We're going to thank everybody else who's here joining us for another episode. Thanks so much! We'll be back live again on Tuesday, July 25th, with Numeracle's Founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson as she tackles the dynamic relationship between Digital Trust and Zero Trust strategies with co-host Dean Coclin, Senior Director of Business Development at Digicert. So see you everybody soon and have a great rest of your day.
Alex Carter: Thanks, everyone. Bye.
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