The New STIR/SHAKEN Anti-Spam Regulations on Phone Calls

Spam calls are worse than a nuisance; they’re a drain on both customers and legitimate businesses. In 2020, Americans received nearly 46 billion robocalls.

That same year, phone scams cost Americans $10 billion. For the past few years, scammers have been spoofing the phone numbers of real people and businesses to carry out their schemes. The crime has been difficult to trace and impossible to police, leaving businesses with little recourse if a phone carrier labels their number “scam likely.”

Thousands of business calls are incorrectly flagged as spam every day, hurting operations.

Enter new regulations. The STIR/SHAKEN revolution has arrived to restore trust in phone communications. In March 2020, the TRACE Act passed Congress. This act seeks to mitigate robocalls and laid the groundwork for caller ID authentication that all phone service providers are expected to follow.

The process is simple: first, a business places an outbound call. Phone carriers check their number for authentication and can assign their call one of three ratings: A for full (both customer and number are verified), B for partial (customer is verified but not their number), or C for gateway (call origination not authenticated). Caller ID will then show the recipient if a caller is verified or likely spam. Attestation levels are meant to give higher trust than do the current procedures.

The benefits of STIR/SHAKEN are numerous. Spoofed numbers are instantly traceable, legitimate businesses can be verified, and consumers will know which calls to trust.

Additional actions companies may take to avoid the wrongful label of spam include having their number validated by a professional company, reducing volume of calls per number, and monitoring their numbers in use to check for red flags.

Thankfully, there are cloud-based power dialers and sales acceleration platforms which fully support compliance with STIR/SHAKEN. This helps its users attain A-level attestation quickly and easily, and boosts calling efficiency without ever sacrificing customer experience.

Don’t let spam claim phone calls for good. Calling can help business if the customer trusts who’s reaching them.