Jake and a co-host walk through five questions dealerships should ask spam protection vendors, including how they handle false positives and whether they monitor for spoofing. They highlight red flags that separate real protection from empty promises.
Hello. We're back again. We're at part two of our series with Jake. Jake, you still doing good?
Yep, doing great.
Okay, so choosing the right spam protection for your dealership. When you're interviewing companies that, that say they help with this, what are the key questions you should ask?
Yeah, I think that this is a key topic because. And it is worth mentioning that when we started dealer identity and brought this solution to automotive, there really wasn't anything comparable that was available to the dealers. You know, now you do run into folks who say they do this, and whether or not that's true, currently, it will be eventually. And so I do want those of you, if you're evaluating different solutions, I want to make sure ultimately that you are protected and aren't being labeled because people were not doing exactly what they're saying they're doing. So the first question that I would ask would be, can you prevent spam and fraud? So just to go over that for a second, everyone thinks of this topic as protecting against the potential spam labels. The scam likely. You know, those messages that come up when you dial your customers and they see that and they don't answer the phone. And that's, of course, a big part of it. But the other major part of this is the fraud tagging. So fraud is reserved for calls that the carriers think are making actual illegal calls, whether you're using, whether they detect illegal dialer or you have TCPA violations in your dialing practices, whatever it may be. But if you're evaluating your provider to protect your calling reputation for your dealership, they should be able to protect against spam and fraud. Really, the fraud is the main agreement that you want to get because the carriers always withhold the right to label you as spam. But preventing them from labeling you as fraud will prevent your calls from being blocked entirely. I think that one's really important. The second question that you want to make sure you ask them is, would you ever recommend number swapping? I've seen this before with some other people in the space where. And it goes back to that question, number one, where they say, hey, you know, we can remove your spam labels, but we are unable to prevent call blocking and fraud tagging and preventing them from labeling you as an illegal caller. Therefore, there are some cases where, you know, we're monitoring your numbers and we're going to tell you, hey, it's time to switch this one out. And I would say that that is a big red flag to me because if, if they are actually protecting your Calling reputation, then you should never need to switch out a phone number. You should never need to go through that aggravation with your customers. Like, you know, we covered that in the last little volley rally here. It does frustrate your customers to switch out these phone numbers and it doesn't really work all the time, so you don't want to do that anyway. And anyone who is protecting your calling reputation should be able to make sure your calls aren't blocked and keep you from needing to switch them out.
Yeah, I think that's really the key. The last part of what you said, protecting your caller reputation. Someone who is monitoring your numbers is providing you a service. But is it a useful service? Is it helping the reputation of your business? You know, I think I'm pretty skeptical if they're saying, constantly confuse your customers by swapping out numbers and without getting to the real problems and, and a real solution that allows and ensures that you never have to do it.
Mm. And the next question I would ask would be, do you have real time monitoring of our numbers reputation? And this is kind of a trick question because the answer to that should be no, there is no such thing as real time monitoring. You do see this on all sorts of websites that, that claim that, oh yeah, we're protecting your numbers and we monitor them in real time. And there is no such thing as real time monitoring. The carriers do not share that data. And any data that you do get from them is a snapshot of that moment. So, you know, there's not a constant feed of this phone number. Here's how it's being labeled and being monitored. It's truly just a snapshot in that moment. So some of these folks who say they have real time monitoring of your numbers, I would push back on that and ask them, hey, what exactly do you mean by that? Because the carriers don't share that. So that's not possible is really what I would say. The fourth question I would ask is, how long does initial registration take? There are people who, I've heard this before. We can get you up and running right away. The carriers take a couple of weeks, you know, two to three weeks, depending on the carrier. One of the three major carriers takes little longer than the other two. But really I'd say about that two to three week mark. If anyone's saying that they can get your numbers cleaned up in a day or a week, again, that, that's something that I, I would be a little skeptical on. And then lastly, in that same vein, how long does your remediation take you, you kind of run into the opposite thing here where I would say if you have the actual agreements in place to protect dealers calling reputation, the remediation only takes a day or so. One of the carriers, again a little longer, so maybe about two days. But it does not take a week or two to remediate a spam tag that comes up after the fact. If someone is saying, hey, you know, this is going to take a little longer, then they may be trying to do the free caller registry submission or some of the other ways to try to, you know, do it on their own. They may not have these actual agreements. So those are the five questions that I would ask someone who you're evaluating to manage your calling reputation and really some of the red flags that I would look out for.
Yeah, great stuff, Jake. Be back soon with part three. Thank you.
Yep. Thank you.
Fixed Ops Roundtable: The TCPA Compliance Panel ft. Scott Davis and Josh Stevens
