What’s Your Call Reputation? Why Monitoring Brand Perception Matters

By Nesia Dotson
First Orion Associate Director of Product Marketing

Trust is critical in any relationship. Within business, it drives purchases, overall customer experience, and loyalty. Without trust, customers navigate with hesitancy, creating negative impacts to those same factors. Even in 2026, word of mouth remains the most powerful and effective form of advertising. This means that what one customer’s or prospect’s experience, whether negative or positive, could be the experience your business is known for by others. Now let us multiply that by the number of times your business calls appear as spam or scam. If you are relying on a phone call to create a lasting impression, and that call is negatively labeled, so is that impression. From the time that phone rings, the call label makes or breaks the interaction. 

When a call is received, the recipient sees a variety of labels including your 10-digit number, a CNAM (CallerID Name), a branded display (such as INFORM® Branded Calling), the city and state reflecting the location of the number, the call category (i.e., Customer Service or Telemarketing), a spam or scam tag, or UNKNOWN. Call labels are intended to tell recipients who is calling and/or why. When these labels are Potential Spam, Spam Risk, or Scam Likely, you can be certain that your business’s reputation is tarnished. Recipients are suspicious of the call, and the call is no longer trustworthy. Fortunately, negative tags are not permanent, and there are solutions that can help.  

Let us first understand why calls are tagged. Carriers partner with Analytic Engines to use sophisticated systems to identify calls made on their network, potentially posing risk to consumers. Various factors related to calling practices (including consumer complaints, excessive calling to a consumer, calling outside business hours, or spikes in call volumes, etc.) can cause legitimate calls to be viewed as unwanted communication. This perception is analyzed and identified in real-time network activity resulting in a negative label being assigned to a phone number. 

Many times, businesses are unaware that their calls are tagged. Low answer rates and sudden spikes in inbound calls can be indicators that something is wrong. In a survey conducted in 2025, First Orion found that over 55% of respondents said they became aware that their business calls were tagged as spam or scam by someone else notifying them. This means that by the time a business number is tagged, damage to the reputation is already done.   

Registering your phone numbers and exercising good calling practices are the first steps to effectively and proactively managing your reputation. First Orion provides each of these tools for free to support businesses in managing their calling reputation.  

First Orion’s Business Number Registration is free, quick, and easy through First Orion’s Customer Portal. Registration provides a fresh start to a phone number’s reputation by virtually erasing the phone number history associated with previous owners. To accomplish this, the business is asked to provide identifying information. Businesses can also choose to “opt-in” to share the registration information with other carriers. First Orion then vets and verifies the business information and notifies multiple carriers of the legitimacy of their business and phone calls. Carriers use the information provided by the business to determine a proper label. This means that by completing First Orion’s Business Number Registration, you can influence how carriers label your outbound calls. 

Our call Behavior Best Practices are industry-standard guidelines that demonstrate respectful, customer-centric calling behavior. When any of these practices are not exercised, the calls are viewed as spamy, unwanted communication which, to the mobile carriers, warrants a negative tag. Tags can be sporadic. They are not permanent. If the calling behavior of a phone number triggers a carrier’s analytic system, the tag is assigned. If the calling behavior changes, the tag is removed.  

While you may feel relief from knowing tags are not permanent, managing the uncertainty of returning tags should be alarming. Businesses can go days to weeks without knowing their outbound calls are being negatively labeled. This is where AFFIRM® Reputation Monitoring can provide relief. Instead of waiting for a customer to tell you are tagged, take proactive measures by using a monitoring system that provides notifications and reporting. Proactive monitoring can provide your business with the insights it needs to adopt consumer-friendly calling practices, resulting in better outcomes. With AFFIRM Reputation Monitoring, businesses get timely visibility into spam and scam activity of their business phone numbers on calls across all major U.S. carriers. Additionally, the business is alerted anytime calls are tagged as spam and scam through First Orion’s easy-to-use customer portal.  

When it comes to managing your reputation, First Orion provides registration within its AFFIRM solution. This means that our Business Number Registration is complimentary to AFFIRM. During onboarding, businesses are guided down a quick and easy path of registering each phone number that will be monitored by AFFIRM.  

How does AFFIRM work? 

• The business is provided the option to conduct their validation calls which allows them to control the frequency they can verify their business calls’ labels or automate their validation calls which is a convenience of First Orion conducting the validation calls on behalf of the business.  
• First Orion collects the data from the validation calls to detect key attributes of each phone call. 
• First Orion then loads call display data in the Customer Portal and alerts business of any call tagged as spam or scam. 

Each of these steps is critical for timely identification of spam or scams, but the last step is most critical for making changes that impact brand perception. This call data feeds multiple AFFIRM reports which are updated on an hourly basis and housed for 90 days to show historical trends.  

Spam tagging is a persistent frustration for businesses because there is no proactive insight into what caused the tag to be assigned. While the call behavior best practices provide proactive measures to implement in calling practices, specific insights into the specific behavior that needs to be remedied to remove the tag is needed. AFFIRM’s data provides reputation intelligence and analytics. Not only does the data show when a negative tag appears on validation calls, but it can also give insights into the behaviors contributing to the spam tag. When businesses incorporate validation calls into their regular calling practices, they can identify patterns that indicate where their attention is needed. Many businesses are using call platforms that cycle through their business calls on an unknown or unmonitored cadence. If this is occurring, the AFFIRM reporting will show the frequency with which the validation calls were made by the calling platform, as well as the display for each carrier. Identifying these patterns helps the business identify calling behaviors that may be perceived as a nuisance to the consumer. AFFIRM’s calling data enables businesses to protect their brand integrity by identifying negative labeling (such as spam/scam tags) and improving overall call effectiveness through actionable insights from call reporting. 

Reflect on the experience of receiving a call. Seems like a casual experience initially; however, think about how it feels to receive a spontaneous call that not only displays a 10-digit phone number but also a Potential Spam or Spam Risk label. Is that an experience you want to give your customers?  Measure trust like revenue. It’s obvious that low answer rates are hitting the bottom line with countless dollars going out the window, but what is the impact of uncertainty on your engagement? Protecting your calling reputation means registering your phone numbers, exercising consumer-friendly calling practices, and proactive monitoring to know when labeling issues arise.