It wasn’t all that long ago when the bane of our collective existence was the proliferation of “spam” e-mail. At the time, there seemed to be nothing worse than the hundreds if not thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages would clog our personal and business e-mail boxes. Now that that annoyance has a diminished profile it seemed natural that something would take its place. Sure enough — now we have “robocalls.”

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In its simplest form a robocall is a phone call using a computerized autodialer that delivers a pre-recorded message. Based on experience, it’s probably a pre-recorded message we don’t want or need. These calls are usually associated with political or telemarketing efforts and often pose as messages from companies or governmental agencies. What tricks some people is that often audio messages are accompanied by a local area code and are personalized to simulate a real phone call.

If there’s any doubt that robocalls have reached epidemic propositions consider that last year close to 48 billion of them were made. That translates to nearly 146 for every person in the United States. If you haven’t been targeted by one yet, you are in select company. And, if you speak with some reps they’ll maintain they’ve received most of these calls.

Offering Incentives

The calls often seek attention by offering incentives (e.g., free trips, low interest loans, inexpensive health insurance), or threaten punishment for uncollected debts. This is all done in an effort to gather valuable personal information.

Earlier this year The New York Times sounded an ominous note with this headline attached to an article: “You Can’t Stop Robocalls. You Shouldn’t Have To.”

In the article that followed, the Times makes the point that there is no effective way to stop them. Pointing out that a full 50 percent of all calls fall into the spam category, the author added his number to the Do Not Call Registry and installed apps on his phone that are supposed to block calls — all to no avail. He goes on to explain that presently carriers (e.g., Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) are working on the problem, but no luck yet.

Finally, the article concludes that while technologists continue to work on locating a fix, unfortunately for the time being “…you and I can’t do much to fight robocalls. But hopefully, someday soon, we won’t have to.”

A typical rep’s view of the robocall problem is offered by MANA Board member John Davis, Paul Davis Automation, Inc., Chardon, Ohio, who notes that similar to the author of the Times article “I don’t have a great method of dealing with them, other than letting all unknown calls go to voice mail and then diligently blocking numbers. It’s not a perfect solution, but it seems to work. We also don’t have any landlines, so we are able to rather effectively screen calls.”

Dealing With a Plague

Regular Agency Sales contributor Terry Brock offers his take on the robocall plague: “There are a few apps you can get that try to block the most common numbers. However, the challenge is that the numbers can be changed rapidly based on software. Also, they often use a number that matches your area code and prefix. Why? Many people feel that if it is someone local calling (hence using your area code and prefix), people are more likely to answer.

“I find that the best defense is to embrace a new strategy for today. I would not have recommended it 10 years ago, especially for those of us in sales (which really, is everybody). You never know when it might be a customer who is genuinely interested in buying from you.

“This new strategy is to recognize the world is different today. If people really want to reach you, they probably will use more than a phone number. Also, you can leave your e-mail on your voice mail message so people will hear it and respond that way.

“I also embrace a simple strategy: If their message is important and they are serious about reaching me, people will leave a voice mail message. No voice mail message left? Then it wasn’t all that important to talk with them. I’ll reach important people in other ways.

“Also, I use Caller ID a lot. If I recognize the number as coming from someone I know, I answer it. No problem there.

“The only other exception would be if I’m expecting a call from someone and it might be them. It is easy if, for instance, I’m expecting a call from my friend, Jack, and he lives in Connecticut with a 203 area code, I’ll probably answer any call from 203 area code temporarily.”

If none of these strategies work for you, perhaps it’s best to just wait it out as we all did with e-mail “spam.” Whether we solved that problem or not, it’s at least not as prominent today as it was in the recent past. Maybe patience is the best strategy.

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