Tom Fisher, Chief Operating Officer of SharpenCX explains how spam labeling works and what that means for businesses

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INDIANAPOLIS, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- There was a time when many of us thought email spam was a scourge that would plague us forever. Now, it's spam calls that make us want to reach through the wires and throttle the person — or bash the machine — on the other end.

What's worse is when legitimate businesses get tagged with the dreaded "Spam Risk" label, sometimes without even knowing it.

That scenario is playing out more often than most organizations realize. Across industries, answer rates are slipping even as the need for outbound communication remains strong. Calls go unanswered. Voicemails pile up. Campaigns underperform. And more often than not, teams blame the usual suspects: scripts, timing, agent behavior.

In many cases, the problem starts long before any of those things matter.

The Label Isn't Coming from the Phone

Most people assume spam warnings come from their phone — an iPhone alert, an Android banner, a little piece of software making a judgment call. In reality, the decision is usually made upstream, by wireless carriers.

Carriers rely on automated systems that evaluate calling behavior across millions of phone numbers. These systems look for patterns: call volume, frequency, answer rates, consumer complaints, and other signals that suggest a number might be generating unwanted calls.

The intent is reasonable. Protect consumers from fraud and abuse.

The problem is that these systems don't distinguish well between bad actors and legitimate businesses operating at scale.

Once a number is flagged as Spam Risk, calls may be labeled, diverted to voicemail, or ignored altogether — regardless of whether the call itself is legitimate.

How Legitimate Businesses End Up in the Crosshairs

Spam labeling isn't a moral judgment. It's pattern recognition.

Organizations that rely on outbound calling are especially vulnerable, even when they follow the rules. Common risk factors include:

• High call volume from a limited pool of numbers
• Low answer rates that raise automated red flags
• Consumer complaints, even when calls are valid
• Manual number rotation without visibility into reputation
• Little insight into how carriers classify outbound traffic

Because the underlying algorithms are opaque, many businesses don't realize there's a problem until performance metrics start to slide — and by then, the damage is often already done.

When the Diagnosis Is Wrong

When calls stop connecting, most teams look inward. They rewrite scripts. They retrain agents. They change call times. Sometimes those efforts help. Often, they don't.

That's because none of them fix a call that never reaches the customer.

Spam Risk labeling creates an invisible barrier between businesses and the people they're trying to reach. The result is frustrated agents, declining productivity, eroding customer trust, and campaigns that fail for reasons no dashboard clearly explains.

For organizations that depend on outbound calling for sales, service, or account resolution, the financial impact can be substantial.

Why Manual Fixes Don't Hold Up

Historically, addressing spam labeling was a manual process. Teams monitored numbers, submitted carrier requests, rotated lines, and waited for reputations to recover. With low call volume, that approach was workable, if inefficient.

At scale, it breaks down.

As carriers rely more heavily on automation and reputation scoring, manual remediation becomes slower, less predictable, and harder to manage. By the time a problem is identified, the opportunity cost has already been paid.

Deliverability Has Become a Strategy Issue

Outbound calling now faces a challenge email marketers encountered years ago. It's no longer just about what you say or how you say it. It's about whether your message gets through at all.

More organizations are starting to recognize that call deliverability — number reputation, monitoring, and remediation — needs to be managed proactively, not treated as an afterthought.

Outbound calling still works. But only when the infrastructure supporting it keeps pace with how carriers and consumers evaluate trust.

Start With Awareness

For many leaders, the first step is simply understanding how spam labeling actually works — and accepting that legitimate operations are not immune.

Calls that fail to connect aren't always the result of poor execution. Increasingly, they're the byproduct of automated systems designed to protect consumers at scale.

Platforms like SharpenCX are responding to this shift by helping organizations manage outbound calling performance more deliberately, including number health and deliverability, in an environment where trust is increasingly defined upstream.

If you want more information about remediation and how your business can avoid the Spam Risk label, SharpenCX offers a free, practical guide in its Sharpen Studio resource library. The guide breaks down how spam labels occur, how remediation works, and what legitimate organizations can do to protect outbound communication at scale.

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SOURCE SharpenCX