How your phone system can help
Scam and spam callers are a nuisance. They waste time, they annoy people and they can cost you money.
Their intent is to trick you, or your staff, into giving away money or information. These ruthless criminals have a variety of methods at their disposal, one of the favourites being the telephone.
If you have a Litenet Cloud VoIP system (or even if you don’t) you can use some of the built-in features to rattle out scam or spam callers, we’ll explain how further down.
How do they do it?
They usually have a database of telephone numbers, thousands and thousands of them. They will buy information from other companies, find it on the dark web, or even simply trawl your website for it. They will use every method they can to retrieve more and more information about contact points within your business. This can be especially irritating if you have a range of Direct Dial (DDI) numbers for your staff as they will call every single number in that list. Like most phishing emails, they are playing a numbers game. The more shots they have, the more likely they are to score.
These databases get uploaded into what’s known as an auto-dialler (or campaign dialler, there’s a few different names for it). What this does is automate the calling action and spreads it out across a number of individuals, like a call centre in reverse. The auto dialler calls the numbers in the database and if it gets answered it connects them with an “agent”.
Auto-diallers are legal if used in the correct manner, and they can be very effective for outbound sales campaigns. They’re clever too, they will be able to recognise if the call has been genuinely answered or if it’s gone to voicemail, and either route the call to an agent or hang up, accordingly.
Fool the auto-dialler
The easiest place for any caller to get a number for your business is usually through your website. Your main number is usually plastered over web pages, literature, business cards and is very easy to find.
By placing an auto-attendant (also known as an IVR, the “press 1 for sales, 2 for support” type of feature) on your main number, you can not only reap the benefits of more efficiently directing your “real” calls to the relevant department, but it can also fool auto-diallers into thinking they’ve reached a voicemail system, causing them to hang up. If the scam/spam caller is a real person, they might also be less inclined to make the necesary key presses to get through to somebody.
Blocklists
Blocklists are a great facility. In fact, they’re technically not blocklists. They are “Intelligent Call Routes”. One of the main purposes of these call routing options is to direct certain callers to specific destinations. In normal everyday use they can:
- Recognise the area code of an inbound call and route it to the correct regional office.
- Recognise the mobile number of a VIP customer and route them through to their account managers directly.
- Recognise registered staff phone numbers and send them to a specific destination
But, they can also BLOCK an inbound number. Useful for persistent callers that call from the same number each time. Repeat nuisance callers can be redirected away from front-line staff and into senior management, HR or security to be dealt with ac.
These features are built-in!
If you have a Cloud VoIP system from Litenet then these features are already built-in to your system, and they don’t cost a penny more to use them! There’s plenty of fancy things you can do, and we’re here to help.
We can provide professionally recorded, royalty free auto-attendant messages, so your customers don’t have to listen to Nigel from Accounts, or Jane from Sales mumbling their way through the menu options. After all, this is going to be the front end of your phone system, the first thing callers hear!
As always, our advice is free. We can guide you in the right direction and help you make informed decisions.
If you don’t currently use us for VoIP… why not? It can’t hurt to find out what we can do for you…
Litenet is a proud associate of the National Trading Standards “Friends against scams” initiative.
