MakeSpace had relied on phone sales as a key channel for customer acquisition, but getting prospects to answer calls proved difficult. MakeSpace’s VP Sales & Customer Support, Sarah Haselkorn, set out to tackle this key problem which was directly hurting revenue. Sarah and her team noticed that the low answer rate was consistent among all customer segments, even for high intent customers who requested that a representative would call them. Were the calls not reaching their customers due to spam challenges? Were the customers seeing the calls but not picking up?

The answer was likely - both. Some MakeSpace customers - including high intent leads who requested a call back - didn’t answer the company’s calls because they did not recognize its unbranded numbers. The low phone answer rate increased the chances of the cell phone carriers labeling these numbers as ‘spam’ or ‘spam likely’, thereby reducing the answer rate even further. Calls labeled ‘spam’ probably led some customers to actively associate MakeSpace’s numbers with spam, further yet reducing answer rate. And so on.

MakeSpace had little domain knowledge about how to deal with phone spam (as opposed to email spam), and how to achieve reliable branded caller ID on cell phones. The team tried to cope as many other companies do, by using methods that are often frustratingly unhelpful. Some are irrelevant, such as registering outbound numbers with a “CNAM” caller ID database, a protocol for landlines that does not work on cellphones. While other methods are sisyphic, such as endlessly rotating to new numbers and delisting the tainted ones.