When you place outbound calls to your customers, their phones may display warnings like SPAM LIKELY or TELEMARKETER instead of your business name or number. Depending on the recipient’s carrier or device, your calls may also be silently blocked or routed straight to their voicemail — the recipient may even see a voicemail notification without ever seeing your call as missed.

This happens because cell phone carriers and vendors run their own tracking and reporting systems to flag calls they consider suspicious. If your number gets caught by one of these systems, it can significantly reduce how often your outbound calls get answered.

Cases of Reports

What the Terminating Side May See

• SCAM LIKELY
• SPAM
• SPAM RISK
• TELEMARKETER
• BLOCK CALLER

What the Origination Side Experiences

• Call failure
• Call misroute
• Busy signal
• The call routes straight to voicemail

How to Fix:

Each vendor maintains its own database to track and report numbers. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to look up whether a number is listed in a given vendor’s database, and vendors don’t publish the exact criteria they use to mark a number as problematic.

Some vendors, such as AT&T, offer their subscribers an app to monitor and report calls. Active Armor is an AT&T app that lets customers report a call as problematic and see how many other users have reported the same number.
There are two ways to address spam labeling: a proactive approach that reduces the odds a number gets flagged in the first place, and a reactive approach for numbers that have already been flagged.

Proactive Procedure:

If you plan to make outbound calls for a business, register your number(s) with the major analytics vendors before you start dialing at volume — this significantly lowers the odds of being quickly marked as problematic. See “Providers and Analytics Partners” below for vendor contact information.

AVOXI customers on a Premium AI Cloud Service plan can also register their organization and numbers directly with our vendors through the Reputation Management feature in Genius. Once registered, AVOXI will show you an ongoing Spam Status for each enrolled number (Clean, Low Risk, High Risk, or Spam), along with a Report Card that scores the number on the same behavioral factors carriers use to evaluate reputation — see “Ways to Improve Your Score” below.

To enable Reputation Management, go to Company Settings in Genius. Coverage is limited to select countries and carriers, and AVOXI cannot guarantee a label will be corrected for external (non-AVOXI) numbers or numbers where the same Caller ID is reused across a very high volume of calls.

Ways to Improve Your Score

Vendors and analytics providers don’t publish an exact formula for what triggers a spam label — largely to keep bad actors from gaming it. That said, the following behaviors are known to influence a number’s reputation:

• Maturity — use the same number consistently over time rather than cycling through numbers; avoid sudden spikes in call volume.
• Desirability (answer rate) — match your outbound Caller ID to the region you’re dialing, and place calls during the recipient’s local business hours.
• Engagement (call duration) — get to the point quickly once a recipient answers; long stretches of dead air or immediate disconnects look like robocalling to carriers.
• Reaction (blocks/reports) — scrub contact lists against Do Not Call registries, and make it easy for recipients to opt out of future calls.

These same factors are also used as inputs elsewhere by AVOXI — for example, in Intelligent Caller ID’s selection logic — so improving them benefits more than just your spam status.

Customer-Friendly Calling Practices

Carriers ultimately look at whether a call is customer-friendly — meaning it respects the recipient’s preferences and applicable calling laws. A call that gets reported as spam is a signal about the experience it created, not necessarily a mistake by the carrier. The following practices, adapted from industry best practices for business callers, go a level deeper than the Report Card factors above and can help reduce complaints and blocks over time:

1. Register every business number. This is covered above under Reputation Management — it’s the single most important step, since it establishes your organization as a transparent, known caller rather than an unidentified one.

2. Avoid excessive repeat calls to the same contact. Space out attempts and track contact history in your dialer or CRM so the same number isn’t called repeatedly in a short window. A simple gut check: would you be annoyed if you received calls at this frequency?

3. Minimize early hang-ups. Train agents to identify themselves and state the reason for the call immediately after connecting. Recipients who don’t quickly understand who’s calling and why are far more likely to hang up or report the call.

4. Eliminate dead air from dialer settings. If a recipient answers and hears silence before an agent joins, they’re likely to hang up — and that pattern reads as robocalling to carrier analytics. Tune predictive dialer pacing to connect the agent the moment the call is answered.

5. Respect local calling hours. Regulations vary by country and region, but a common outer bound for telemarketing-type calls is 8 a.m.–9 p.m. local time for the recipient. Confirm the specific rules that apply to each market you dial into.

6. Use high-integrity contact lists. Dial lists built from ethically sourced, well-curated leads who have shown real interest in your business perform better and generate fewer complaints than broad, low-quality lists.

7. Honor opt-out signals, spoken or unspoken. A hang-up or repeated non-engagement is effectively a “not interested” signal, even without an explicit opt-out request. Track these preferences and suppress future outreach accordingly.

8. Hold agents to a consistent standard of professionalism. Agent conduct directly shapes whether a recipient blocks or reports a number. Monitor calls and reinforce training on respectful, empathetic communication.

9. Don’t chase a lead indefinitely. Persistent outreach to the same contact over many months — with no engagement — increases the odds of a spam report, since the recipient may no longer recall the original reason for contact. Set a reasonable cutoff for follow-up attempts.

10. Consider adding branded Caller ID. Displaying your company name, logo, and call reason on the recipient’s screen builds instant recognition and trust, which improves answer rates on top of a clean spam status. AVOXI’s Branded Caller ID is part of the same Reputation Management initiative — reach out to your AVOXI representative for availability.

Reactive Procedure

If you receive a report that your number has been marked as spam, register it with the relevant analytics vendor(s) directly (see contacts below). Response times vary by vendor and cannot be predicted.

If the number is already enrolled in AVOXI Reputation Management, you’ll see the flagged status reflected in your weekly Analytics report and AVOXI Digest, but AVOXI does not currently have the ability to request removal of a label on the customer's behalf — see the FAQ below.

Providers and Analytics Partners

While some carriers maintain their own internal platform for marking and reporting a number as problematic, many rely on a third-party vendor. The industry-maintained list below covers most major carriers and analytics providers:

USTelecom Industry Traceback Group – Call Labeling and Blocking Points of Contact

Top Vendor Contacts

AT&T:

Use the link below to submit a request to correct a number’s Caller ID or spam rating with AT&T:

Reporting calls mislabeled as spam or incorrect Caller ID

T-Mobile:

T-Mobile has its own portal for customers to report an issue with how a number is being displayed:

T-Mobile Call Reporting

Verizon:

Verizon has its own portal for reporting issues with how a number is displayed:

Verizon Voice Spam Feedback

Cell Phone Manufacturers

Cell phone manufacturers can also have built-in methods to restrict calls for the customer.

Samsung:

Newer Samsung phones display Caller ID information on inbound calls — even when the subscriber isn’t paying their carrier for the service — through Samsung’s Smart Call system. Customers can use the following support request form to ask that an entry be corrected:

Hiya Support — Submit a Request

FreeCallerRegistry.com is a centralized portal that is co-managed by the analytics providers for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. They would provide their business details and numbers to verify they are a "known" caller.
But they may also want to submit a case to the analytics providers directly if they know what carriers are specifically marking them as spam.

FAQ:

Can AVOXI submit a request to these vendors to remove the wrong label?

Directly with the analytics vendors, generally no — while we’re always willing to go the extra mile for our customers, most vendors require information best answered by the number’s owner, and may follow up via the email used to register the number, which an AVOXI agent would not receive.

What AVOXI can offer is proactive monitoring: Premium AI Cloud Service customers can enroll numbers in Reputation Management to get visibility into spam status before or after a label appears. This is monitoring, not label removal — remediation is not guaranteed; however, AVOXI will work with our vendors in an attempt to remove spam labels on flagged numbers.

What are the criteria to avoid being marked as spam?

Vendors and analytics providers don’t publish their exact criteria, likely to prevent bad actors from gaming the system. Based on available data the following are known to play a role:

• User input — a recipient reports a call as bad within their smartphone or a third-party app
• Call analytics — how often your number hits the vendor’s network, how frequently, and how long the calls last
• Call frequency and timing — whether the number is used at consistent, predictable times

See “Ways to Improve Your Score” and “Customer-Friendly Calling Practices” above for concrete steps.

How long does it take for a vendor to remove an incorrect label?

We can’t say — each vendor has its own process and timeline, and none publish an expected turnaround.

Is there any way to know if a number has been labeled?

There is no single national database that tracks spam labels across all carriers and vendors. However, if a number is enrolled in AVOXI Reputation Management, you will see its current Spam Status (Clean, Low Risk, High Risk, or Spam) in your weekly Analytics report and AVOXI Digest — based on our vendor's data for that number, within the supported coverage.

Can I buy numbers that aren’t marked as spam?

There isn’t a way to guarantee a number has never been reported. Most vendors retain a number’s history in their database for a few months to allow time for reports to age out, but exactly how long varies by provider and isn’t published.

Shouldn’t STIR/SHAKEN prevent this issue? Is this a STIR/SHAKEN issue?

STIR/SHAKEN validates that a call isn’t being spoofed and allows it to reach the terminating carrier’s network. From there, analytics provider input, user reporting, and carrier analytics independently determine whether the call is labeled as spam — STIR/SHAKEN attestation doesn’t prevent a properly-authenticated call from still being labeled.

Does Reputation Management guarantee my number won’t be labeled as spam?

No. Reputation Management improves visibility and, over time, can help customers adjust dialing behavior that contributes to spam labeling — but AVOXI cannot guarantee a number will not be flagged, and coverage is limited to the countries and carriers our vendors support.