Technology has made it possible for people to make calls from almost anywhere in the world and reach their prospects. While it may be simple to dial a phone number from anywhere, you want to make sure that your call is going to go through the line and hopefully result in a connection.
This is where Call Deliverability comes into place. Similar to email deliverability best practices, call deliverability aims to recognize that a person is calling a person rather than a robot (because no one appreciates a spammer).
Salesloft offers steps your team can take to greatly reduce the risk of a call being flagged as phone spam. Some best practice measures involve managing your team's call traffic, verifying your business communications using Trust Hub, and avoiding spam labeling.
In this article, we will walk through some ways your team can maintain healthy call deliverability, including:
For additional information, check out our Dialer Troubleshooting Guide and our Manage Trust Hub in Salesloft articles.
In order for your team to have success with Call Deliverability, it’s important to be mindful of the type of call traffic being sent to carriers. Carriers are looking for suspicious traffic behaviors that may be performed by a bot or spam.
Salesloft recommends keeping these practices in place as you dial to ensure calls are wanted and answered:
- Consistent call rhythms: Avoid bursts of many calls in a short time period, aim for one call per minute or longer if possible. These patterns mimic a bots behavior to dial without considering human correspondence and appear suspicious to carriers.
- Good call behaviors: Avoid excessive calls to the same recipients in short spans of time if they are not answering as it shows carriers the traffic is unwanted or may get you flagged as spam. Additionally, avoid calling during off-hours as that can appear as abnormal or robotic behavior.
- Avoid short duration calls: Carriers may flag calls under 6 seconds due to not meeting voice compliance standards. We recommend allowing calls to fully ring through to voicemail along with leaving a message (Voicemail Drop) before hanging up.
- Aim for high answer rates: Focus on calling recipients that have opted in to receiving communications or are willing to answer a call so carriers know your calls are wanted and successfully connected.
- Use registered numbers, if possible: "Number masking" may appear untrustworthy to your prospect and to carriers and will not carry the same verified protections as a number under the Salesloft TrustHub platform.
- Avoid number swapping: Churning through numbers is a common practice used by fraudulent callers as it prevents them from being traced back or filtered away. Once a known spammer is blocked, they will switch to a new number to regain access. Holding onto numbers helps ensure the number maintains a positive reputation and call history with carriers.
- Follow TCPA Regulation: Calls should include the callers' business name, purpose of the call, and how the customer can opt-out of receiving future calls. US calls must include this information to be compliant.
- Register your business for TrustHub: The Salesloft TrustHub umbrella provides carriers with a verified business profile and ownership of numbers. This will enroll numbers with technologies around STIR/SHAKEN, CNAM, Voice Integrity and A2P10DLC which are all built to trust and verify the source of Dialer & SMS traffic. You can learn more and register your business via Salesloft's Trust Hub
The Salesloft Trust Hub is a self-service resource portal for businesses to register and verify their identities. The portal connects directly to your carrier and provides all of the information and validation needed for your calls traversing their network.
By utilizing a verified business profile, you are able to take full advantage of the Dialer related services that help improve call deliverability.
Trust Hub uses the following aspects to benefit to your business’s Dialer practices:
STIR/SHAKEN authenticates the caller and determines if they are authorized to use the number to place the call.
Salesloft teams can register for STIR/SHAKEN inside the Salesloft platform. You can learn more in the Manage Trust Hub in Salesloft article.
CNAM
Caller Name Delivery (CNAM) is a technology carriers use to look-up and deliver the caller ID displayed on inbound calls.
In the US, various public entities keep a database of name records associated with phone numbers. Whenever a phone call is made, a CNAM “dip” is performed in their respective databases to retrieve the latest name record associated with the caller. Ideally, these records would be kept up to date as number ownership changes by submitting carrier requests. Depending on when a number or name record was last changed and/or updated, the databases may be outdated.
Since the CNAM service allows carriers to provide a contextual name with the call, it is very important to US based customers for identification. This practice can significantly improve answer rates and responses since the person being called is able to recognize the caller. Salesloft recommends all customers have a CNAM registration setup with their numbers to ensure the correct outbound caller ID is displayed to prospects.
CNAM setup is typically handled during your Salesloft implementation but can also be requested at any time—especially as new phone numbers are acquired or your display name changes.
To configure CNAM for your assigned phone numbers, please contact Salesloft Support and request to have those specific numbers allowlisted for CNAM. This process enables your chosen "Company Name" to display on outbound calls.
Things to Note:
- CNAM configuration is not a one-time setup. If your team adds new phone numbers in Salesloft after your initial CNAM request, you must submit another Support request to allowlist those additional numbers. CNAM is only applied to the specific numbers included in each request.
- The CNAM that appears on a recipient’s caller ID does not need to match your legal business name. It can be any 15-character string you choose (e.g., "Acme Sales Team").
Voice Integrity
Thanks to enhancements around user self-service, carriers & spam analytic vendors have provided many paths to verifying and protecting businesses that are making legitimate phone calls. Since Salesloft is the owner and facilitator of your numbers, we are able to directly verify customers with our carriers and vendors via our Voice Integrity registration.
Voice Integrity submits basic company information and call usage data to all carriers & spam vendors, so they are aware of the numbers placing calls and expected volumes. This helps prevent any false positives or previous negative usage to impact your call traffic. Note, this does not grant customers immunity to poor reputation or labels, this simply helps separate legitimate traffic from non-compliant traffic. Once submitted, we strongly encourage customers to maintain our best practices to ensure long-term success and deliverability for your Dialer calls.
The registration process for Voice Integrity is not currently supported by our automated TrustHub registration in-app, but can be initiated or verified by contacting our Support team or your Customer Success team. Once your business registration is submitted, please allow a few weeks for the request to fully propagate throughout the respective networks.
Can Salesloft fix mislabeled calls?
By registering for TrustHub, a footprint is established within the carrier network and ensures all calls are authenticated and verified. This is the first line of defense when it comes to avoiding spam labels. However, it is equally as important to verify and register numbers with the spam vendors themselves to wipe away and reset any negatively associated labels.If your team has not yet registered for TrustHub or Voice Integrity, we strongly suggest completing the process from within our app and contacting our Support team or your Customer Success team to verify this has been completed. TrustHub will help verify your business with our partner carriers and Voice Integrity is the same process as submitting your numbers to Free Call Registry (FCR) which will verify your business with the spam vendors on your behalf. While Salesloft is able to register and verify numbers on your behalf, you are able to provide your company & contact information to get your numbers both on and off the Salesloft platform registered directly with the spam vendors as well. Below are the public resource links to each vendor's registration page should you wish to complete this step directly.
Things to Note: This process may take a few weeks to propagate whether via Salesloft Support or directly, but will ensure the vendors calculating spam risks do not negatively flag your calls.
