- Date: 4 April 2017
If you own a small business, you’re likely familiar with how annoying spam calls can be – especially if you rely on inbound calls to help drive sales. Unfortunately, you’re not alone. In 2016, an estimated 20 million business hours were wasted in the United States alone due to spam calls, translating into more than $475 million annually. While progress has been made to help filter out spam calls through the Do Not Call Registry, advancements in wireless carrier technologies, and end-user services and apps that help reduce the number of spam calls, there are still a few tricks a savvy business owner needs to implement to ensure their time and money isn’t wasted by responding to spam phone calls.
Don’t Fall for Messaging Voicemail Spam
You’ve probably seen these if you use a third-party messaging app such as Skype or WhatsApp. A legitimate-looking message arrives prompting you to follow a link and listen to a voicemail message in your Skype or WhatsApp inbox. Instead of playing a recorded message, a malicious website is opened and malware is downloaded to your mobile device. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to never open a message from a recipient you don’t know, but for those conducting business overseas who rely on international-friendly messaging apps to communicate with clients or coworkers, it’s wise to be extra cautious.
Put Up Barriers
Some wireless carriers, phone providers, and smartphones offer services that require human input to continue the call. Callers are prompted to press 1 to leave a voicemail or say their name before the connection is made, helping users filter through unwanted calls and messages. But that can raise issues with less tech-savvy users, confusing them and resulting in half-completed messages or hang ups. Google Voice provides a decent filter between wanted and unwanted calls, but it’s also a big target and is historically ignored by Google as a whole, leaving it vulnerable and unreliable for important business messages.
Use a Professional Business Voicemail Service
Using automated voicemail filtering and transcription services to help you sort through your business voicemails seems like a straightforward option, but the reliability of these services combined with the wildly, embarrassingly inaccurate results they provide can be more than a slight annoyance – it can cost you customers. Using a professional business voicemail service with human transcription and fast turnaround times can be highly valuable for a business owner on the go. At Phone Cloud Hub, we offer U.S.-based, local phone numbers, cloud-based voicemail inboxes, and fast, accurate human-transcribed voicemail-to-text services allowing you to read and respond to important business voicemails from any device. Best of all, there’s no expensive hardware to buy or install and your voicemail inbox storage is unlimited, ensuring you’ll never miss an important business voicemail due to technological restrictions.
For a free trial or to find out more about the benefits of premium business voicemail services from Phone Cloud Hub, sign-up today.
