Effective today, you will be receiving weekly emails highlighting call quality on your account as a courtesy. These are in beta so we welcome feedback in Community Slack.
These have a few aims:
Recognising those doing well
They also highlight any areas in danger of going off track, e.g. you’re retrying calls which will never complete – see Jakob’s ‘no means no’ blog recently. We also find that often, nuisance calls can appear from a previously good account (we call it ‘good customer gone bad’). These reports give you a heads-up if your stats suddenly deteriorate because someone has onboarded an account they shouldn’t!
Highlighting how we’re protecting your customers
We’re blocking an unprecedented level of spam and scam calls targeting your customers. It approximates 5% of the attempts on the network, but will be a lot more when the rest of the industry does something and we can crank things up more. We estimate we could take 40% of calls of the network based on existing Ofcom rules but while other carriers are doing nothing, this would be somewhat self-sabotaging for us and our customers. However, if you consider every blocked call is a granny’s life savings potentially saved, 5% is huge. These reports show you precisely how many calls we’ve protected your customers from.
No other carrier is doing this, which means only other platforms using Simwood have this level of protection. This really is something you could and should be telling your customers you are doing for them. If they port their number away from your service (unless to another Simwood customer), they will lose all of this protection.
Showing where you can improve
We don’t go into details on the precise triggers for our nuisance call blocking, but these reports show headline account-level stats, some unique to Simwood, which are considered by our compliance team when assessing accounts. Some of these may be unintended, a surprise, or a sudden change. In these cases the report enables you to address the problem. The excuse of not knowing doesn’t apply any more.
We really hope you find these reports useful but do need to highlight what they are NOT for. We find that when we protect accounts from fraud, or block nuisance calls, or basically do anything which results in us sharing information transparently by notification, there are a subset of customers who will immediately hit reply all to argue about it or demand an explanation / evidence. These reports are not for that. Bluntly, it is not viable for us to invest in protections and reject revenue simply to inflate our support costs and we must ask customers to respect that. The reports and your own CDRs/traces should be enough for you to put right anything which is wrong, but if you require our help, professional services charges will apply. Please note though, under no circumstances will we divulge which exact numbers have been blocked and why.
Lastly, we wanted to include a few examples as every account’s report will be fairly unique. As you will see we give an overall quality rating for an account as well as colour coded metrics. The colour coding shows if you are in the top (green) or bottom (red) quartile across our customer base. You should take action where any stats show in red, as these are undesirable traits and will likely lead to traffic being blocked, or complaints, if not by us then downstream. Of course, these are account level and performance at the number level, which is where we filter, may well be different.
A great account doing everything right:
An account doing well, but clearly onboarding some accounts they shouldn’t – indicated by the elevated levels of outbound rejections despite good headline stats.
An account doing just fine:
An account systemically onboarding problematic traffic:
We hope you find these useful and look forward to your feedback in Community Slack.
