New IOS 26 Update - Is This The End Of Phone Sales?

Everyone lost their mind when call screening in iOS 26 came out. And I'm here to give you the exact data of what's happened in outbound dialing since that rollout. I own a dialer. I can see millions of dials and hundreds of different businesses calling all different sorts of leads, from cold calling to inbound to outbound, everything opt in, non opt in, you name it. And I'm going to give you the exact nitty gritty data. What's working, what's not working, the real tangible impact it's had on the numbers. And I'm going to give you step by step strategies that you can use in order to maximize your chance of getting people to pick up the phone to, so you can actually make some sales. Okay, so what is this iOS call screening? Okay, if you have an iPhone, if you have an Android, you're like, hey, this has been on for years, right? But if you have an iPhone, you're like, what's this new thing? So what it is is it's people that are not in your contacts, you have the option and the ability to screen those. And so it's automatically going to get sent to a live transcribed voicemail and it's going to transcribe exactly why you're calling and then they can decide to pick up or not. So there are some things behind the scenes that are happening. Essentially it's automatic SP detection for unknown callers. Right Now I have been told that attestation score and the overall health of the number and the score of the number will play a role. And if this is automatically triggered or not, there's little evidence to support that that is the case. However, that may be coming in future updates. But essentially like, it's just designed to stop spam callers. Now if you're an opt in, you're not a spam caller. So we want to make sure that it doesn't actually screw you up. Okay, the, the overall promise that Apple's saying is fewer missed calls and fewer spam. It's going to divert low quality, flag things automatically to voicemail, anything that's suspicious or likely, all that kind of stuff, and it's going to allow you to label it as spam very, very easily. And so it, it does add some friction points. However, I don't really think it's that massive of a deal and I'm going to kind of explain why. So when it comes to like dying, there's a couple of things happening that you may not know about. And one of them is like the meta analysis of all of the information that comes with the data and the signal. Okay, and that's call origin and call volume, repeatable patterns, anything that looks suspicious, all that kind of stuff may trigger it. But really it's going to be like anyone who's not in the comments contacts. Now the big thing is like how many people actually use these features. And the good thing is we have some data on that because you know, Apple is a very consumer heavy product and the people who use Apple are usually less tech minded than Android. That's just kind of how it works. You can argue with me in the comments but that's usually kind of the breakup and demographic. But on the Android platform the spam filtering was only like a 5 to 15% uptake on the actual feature because it's kind of annoying because especially like if you're a salesperson you're never going to turn it on. If you're an entrepreneur you're never going to turn it on because 1 in 8 and 1 in 8 people is a salesperson. A lot of people are entrepreneurs. A lot of people use their phones and they're in constant communication with people that don't know, like business owners or whatever for a living. And so it's going to be an incredibly annoying thing to have. Like I haven't turned mine on, I never will because I would find it annoying to have to sit there and read it when I can just decide whether or not I call or call back. Like it's a very, I feel like it's solving a problem that doesn't necessarily exist because I don't feel like it solves the problem and just kind of gives you a different way. Now you have to read it instead of hearing it. I don't really think it is too much of a difference. So the uptake has never been enormous in terms of this and having owning a dialer. Having seen the amount of people that go to Google Voice, although it's definitely, it's a good chunk like you know, say 10, 15% of all the non pickups but you know, then you got to take the pickups and like into account. So it's a relatively small proportion that actually end up with that outcome. And even then you can bypass Google Voice with a call within 15 minutes and then just it rings through anyway. And realistically I think there's a couple ways in order to I guess make it a semi positive. But overall uptake isn't huge. So I went through the numbers of like I took a random segment of Clients that are on dialer from different industries. I've taken like info space, I've taken people with organic leads. I've taken like infrastructure, I've taken financial services, roofing trades, coaching. I've taken a good chunk and I've gone through the data specifically from the month before to the month now. So August 15th, September 15th, it rolled that mid September and September 15th to now, which at the filming this is like October 14th. And this is exactly what I saw. Okay, in terms of like Andy Elliott, so he's on our dialer. Overall, there was a 2% drop in pickup rate from those two days. That's it. So 2%. So he went from a total pickup rate of 15% to 13%. And that's one dial, one pickup, right across all different campaigns. New leads, old leads, everything. Cole Gordon, for example, he saw a. He went from 17.1% to 22.99%. So he saw an increase of nearly 7% pickup rate. Gator Roofing, which is a roofing company, there's a large volume through our platform, they went from 12 to 9.5. So again, statistically somewhat there. We had a financial services company called Crown and they went from 18 to 15.4. Smart trading, which is an info space product, which has a heavy organic presence, went from 16 to 25 in that same time period. And Viva, which didn't have the time period before that. But they are a new client of Dara. They've been on for about four weeks now, and they're an infrastructure team doing high volume outbound and they have a 28.5% pickup rate. So all in all, I see really no statistical increase or decrease given the rollout of iOS 26 adaptation. Uptake of this feature will obviously increase over time, I would assume, although the iOS 26 rollout has been pretty disastrous anyway because the software has been so glitchy. But I haven't turned it on, I haven't had it. I haven't seen it be too much of an issue. The statistical variances that I'm seeing across all different swaths of industries are the same as the variance that you would get from month to month anyway because, you know, speed to lead plays a factor. 2% pickup rate here. It's really neither here nor there. I will continue to track and monitor this and see if it does create an issue. But you know, what we have to understand is that this has been on Android for years. I mean, Android has been doing this in all of its skins since I think like for five plus years, I think in two. In 2020 the Google Voice stuff came out and that was adapted and you know, it's been going for years. Carriers have also been doing this and the spam detection features, plus they've been using attestation scoring and the stir shaken protocols in order to block before it even gets there. Which is the thing is a far more aggressive thing and nobody seemed to give a shit about that because you didn't know what was happening. Right. So they've been doing that since 2018. But let's talk about like what you can actually do, the tangible action steps that you can take in order to maximize this. If, if you are seeing a downturn, okay. Or if you expect or if you think you're seeing a downturn or ever. I don't think you really are. At least not from that. It could just be a covariance based on month to month. However, I think that the call screening and the Google Voice and the iOS screening, I think it brings up an interesting opportun to where you need to be good at that little 30 second drop. So I hear a lot and it's like yeah, it's Matt from dialer and they just sit there and wait like that is a really shitty message. Like I'm not reading that. You know, it's like so that is sales copy and that should be scripted. So if I have running an outbound team and they hit Google Voice, they should have a specific script for when they hit Google Voice, they should have a specific script for when they hit iOS transcribing. Because one's going to be listened to and one's going to be read. So and try a bunch of different variants and see which gets the highest rate. Have them track it manually, whatever. Right. How many of those did you hit versus how many picked up? Hey, it's just Matt from Dollar, you asked to give you a call about increasing your pickup rates. Let me know if you have some time. I'll stay on the line. So you pick up like something like that. I don't know it's going to work. I guess you just have to try it. But testing different variants and whoever figures that out will absolutely crush it. Because when you think about it now you have the opportunity to guarantee that they're going to read something or have a high likely they're going to read it where they were probably just doing that. Now they're actually reading a message from you. So you have another opportunity to be able to send your message to someone. Okay. The next thing besides that is like using verified caller IDs. So don't use shitty numbers, don't change your numbers out constantly. That's really going to burn you. If a number is marked as spam, okay. It doesn't mean that you kill it, it's just not what you do. What you do is you, you then use that number differently. You need to rotate through your numbers. I have other things on that dialer does automatically but you want to use like good quality numbers. You want to abide by the stir shaking protoc. If you don't know what they are, just Google it. Okay. I would say single line dialing only. Multi line dialing lowers attestation scoring. Also a lot of the time automatic answering machine detection is on. Automatic answering machine will automatically, if you get sent to screening, it'll automatically like cut the call. I think that that is a thing that a lot of people are going to have to change because they probably don't realize that that's going to happen. So if they are seeing a significant downturn since the uptake in the iOS 26, I think it's probably going to be through that AMD, right? Automatic answering machine detection and that's just automatically cutting way more calls. So you know, because it's just there now. So now instead of it being 15%, maybe it's 30% of all the calls between the iOS and the Android and now it's just automatically kind of cutting them down. All right, monitor your numbers, okay? For spam numerical you can do it through number verifier. There's a bunch of ways to do it. Like I don't think there's any really good solution, but there are plenty of solutions out there that will give you somewhat of an idea. Rotate your numbers, okay? Make sure that they're being used, used under a certain threshold. So I would say less than 75 to $100 per day per number. And try not to do on a pattern. So rotate them every hour or two. Encourage warming up and proper call cadences. So like when you get a new number, don't just like dive in and start going balls to the walls immediately. You want to kind of use time to just kind of be able to, you know, making sure that you're warming numbers up just like you would with an email. Also like making sure that you're not over dialing with a single number or like calling too aggressively in a short period of time. Register your number with a trusted database. Also the free call registry is a fantastic thing. It works well. It actually works a Lot better than most like remediation services, I would say fallback options like have sms, have email, so have multi channel things going on because it's going to be very beneficial. And then if you know the numbers that you're calling from, then you can have them in an email or have them in a text and say hey, I'm calling from this number, save it. And then if it's in the contacts they're going to, it's not going to get screen anyway. And then have regular audits of which numbers are being flagged, etc. Etc. Right. So you know, my final thoughts are don't panic over iOS 26. Like I don't think it's the outbound darling apocalypse. I just don't see any data to support that. It would be, nor do I think it would be beneficial for any of the companies involved to totally alienate themselves from the businesses that are the lifeblood of the economy. So that's a good idea. I think the people who win are going to be the people who adapt to this quickly and who start to realize there is an opportunity here. It's not just all fucking doom and gloom. I think that if you are on a shit dialer that has low attestation scoring and I think especially if you're using poor old local presence styling, I think you're going to be in serious trouble because that is like the lowest form of like call quality and I, I have a feeling that at some point, either now or in the future, those are going to be automatically like attestation level C automatically sent out. Right. And they will be screened and there's nothing you can do about it because you're a shipbag using a shipbag system. But yeah, I'm going to keep digging into the numbers but overall man, I don't think that there's any need to panic and I think from what I'm seeing, we're all going to be okay.