Nearly all enterprise hates illicit robocalls, because:
- Receiving illicit robocalls can consume significant time and resources for a company’s employees- a topic I shall discuss at some length in a future article.
- When customers no longer pick up robocalls, it becomes far more difficult for a company to reach out to them – making multiple call attempts is no fun for anyone, plus there is the time and opportunity loss.
In this article, let’s talk about the direct and indirect financial impact of illicit robocalls on the complete telecommunication ecosystem.
Financial Impact
In the month of July 2022, 3.8 BILLION robocalls were placed across the USA, which comes to 123.1 million calls per day – approximately 11 calls per person per day! If that is not insane, I don’t know what is… oh wait…I do. The 3.8 billion calls in July 2022 is an 11.9% drop over June 2022! (Source: Robocall) Whoops! Estimates are that anything from 10% to 45% of all calls made in the USA is now robocalls, and most of them are now spam or scam calls. (Source: Robokiller) Even though many are now blocked at various points, a significant number still ends up reaching the consumer.
There is a serious financial impact – even if we consider just 10% of calls to be spam robocalls (Source: Hiya.com) – consider the infrastructure that is being used to support them.
And yet, personally speaking, I think the financial impact is the least important issue when it comes to illicit robocalls.
Loss of Engagement
In my previous article, I mentioned that a phenomenal 8 out of 10 Americans no longer pick up phone calls from unknown numbers, and nearly all of them do so due to apprehension of spam calls/scam calls/robocalls. This loss of engagement has significant costs – organizations struggle to get in touch with customers for very legitimate issues – emergencies, renewals, reminders… a significant increase in unnecessary friction. The follow-on effects – lost customers, unhappy customers, angry customers… not fun at all.
And you can see this in the sheer number of complaints to the FTC. In 2021, consumers filed a little over 5 million complaints with the FTC, of which 3.4 million were about robocalls (Source: FTC).
The graphic below has more details.
Trust Deficit
The lack of trust has a significant impact on business. Whereas it was once quite common to share credit card details on the phone, eight of ten Americans no longer feel comfortable sharing personal details (credit card, SSN etc.) on the phone. And four of ten Americans prefer that companies contact them via email rather than phone. (Source: Clutch)
The Reputational Damage
Enterprises with time-sensitive and critical communications consider their phone numbers to be valuable assets – and put great value by them. For example, my personal manager at my bank always calls from a specific number – so that the number is associated with the bank. But one of the challenges that the illicit robocaller pandemic has spawned is that a significant number of illicit robocaller spoof their Caller IDs while running their scams, which causes reputational damage to the companies whose numbers are spoofed. We recently encountered a shipping company whose customers no longer trusted its agents when they called. The reputational damage gets even worse when the company’s phone numbers get added to the analytics firms’ databases that provide customers’ spam/scam identification services because the company’s calls are then tagged as ‘likely spam’ or ‘likely scam’.
The Tragedy of the Commons
The Robocalling pandemic is a classic example of The Tragedy of the Commons – a common facility (the telephony network) that provides immense value to all is used by all. But some bad actors rationally figure out that it is in their interest to abuse this common facility – the gain is high and the risk is very low- one study indicates that the cost of making robocalls for the scamsters is upwards of USD 438 million, and the returns are around USD 6 billion! (Robokiller). The downside is that this abuse degrades the commons for all of us. The caretakers of the commons – the FTC and the major carriers now have the responsibility to clean up the robocalling ecosystem – so that trust in the system can be restored. In later articles, we will discuss what actions are being planned for and taken by the caretakers and what you as an enterprise can do to protect yourself, your employees, and your customers from this.
Have more questions? Send me an email at securityeducation@assertion.cloud
About Assertion:
Assertion® is a leading communication security solutions provider that empowers companies to Collaborate Confidently. Our ultimate goal is to secure every conversation through our advanced AI-enabled collaboration security solutions. We also provide holistic infrastructure security for over 38 collaboration products, including full-stack collaboration security solutions for the UC and CC stack.