How to stop scam business calls

Scam calls to businesses increased by 118% between 2020 and 2021.

Despite all the digital communications technology available to businesses and for scammers to use, the phone remains the primary way that scammers or unsolicited sales requests are made.

These calls are not just a nuisance to businesses, costing time and money in lost productivity, they can be dangerous if your employees fall for a scam.

But when you’re busy it’s easy to understand how these calls can slip through.

Luckily there are a few ways to stop scam or nuisance calls getting through to your business, some more effective than others.

Here’s a few options:

1 – Register for The Telephone Preference Service

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is available to consumers as well as sole traders and businesses registered as partnerships.

It allows you to remove your phone number from public lists and ‘opt out’ of receiving calls from third parties who use sales lists to generate new leads.

It’s one way to at least keep your number off publicly available lists.

However, it’s not guaranteed and registering with the TPS doesn’t always guarantee you won’t receive unwanted calls.

2 – Register with The Corporate Telephone Preference Service

The Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) is the business equivalent of the TPS and allows your registered business to opt out of sales lists and public registers.

Like the TPS it’s not always a guarantee that your number won’t be available to other third parties via sales lists, as it depends on the quality of lists and how often they are updated or ‘cleaned’.

3 – Block numbers

This obviously won’t stop you getting nuisance calls initially, but whenever you get a call from a number you don’t want to deal with, you can always block the number and it could at least mean you won’t continue to get calls from that number.

4 – Request to be removed from sales/ marketing lists

 If you’ve previously given consent to be contacted by other businesses for marketing or sales purposes, but now no longer want to be contacted, you’ll have to remove consent for any future communications.

Once you’ve rejected consent to be contacted, these organisations must comply with your request and will be in breach of data regulations.

5 – Use a call answering service

With a  professional call answering service you can create a screen between your business and any unwanted sales or scam calls you don’t want to deal with.

Working closely with your receptionists, you can establish a criteria for the calls you want to deal with, and those which you want to keep away from your team.

You can also ask your call answering service to have you removed from sales lists when people call you, meaning you’ll receive fewer scam or nuisance calls over time.

6 – Report nuisance and scam calls

If you ever receive a scam call you should report it to either Ofcom or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)

Both these organisations are responsible for investigating and potentially prosecuting scam callers so it’s essential you report any suspicious calls or unsolicited calls that you’ve asked not to receive.

Once you’ve explicitly requested not to be contacted by a business, these callers will then be in breach of privacy regulations and can be prosecuted and fined if you report them.

Protect your business and improve productivity

 As you can see there are several ways to protect your business from scam or nuisance calls.

If you want to use a telephone answering service, get in touch with us at Face For Business.

Our call agents can handle your calls for you so you don’t have to and can request to have you removed from sales lists and public registers.

By working closely with you to understand the types of calls you deal with and the process you want in place to handle different types of calls, you’ll never have to worry about dealing with unsolicited, nuisance calls again.