Ever have a telemarketer call during dinner? Ever wonder how so many telemarketers still manage to call despite being on the federal Do Not Call Registry list? For those who have wondered any of those things or any variant of those things, the idea of the spam call is not only well known, but often reviled. The idea of the spam call happening during work hours, meanwhile, is perhaps even more infuriating. Spam calls have costs, and a Business2Community report makes clear how spam calls have costs for all involved.

Some reports suggest that unwanted phone calls cost businesses around a half-billion dollars annually just in terms of lost productivity, as workers break into a work day to answer the phone and discover that an unwanted message—or even dead air in some cases—waits on the other end. While this is unpleasant enough for individuals who can turn to the federal Do Not Call Registry, businesses often don't have this option, and instead are left to manage spam calls alone, putting up otherwise valuable resources toward managing this issue.

There are some tools that can help here, however; some have brought in interactive voice response (IVR) systems that can prove not only helpful for humans trying to reach a certain department, but also helpful to stymie the efforts of spam calls, forcing said calls to traverse the same voice menu system to make contact, something that not every call can do. Caller ID routing can help on this front too, sending certain numbers or blocks of numbers to specific holding centers for dealing with spam calls.

Moreover, call tracking technology also comes into play on fending off spam calls, with some companies turning to call tracking companies to “cleanse” and “age” incoming numbers to help ensure that a number used for a previous campaign isn't suddenly being used elsewhere, causing confusion among incoming callers.

While the costs to the business that receives the spam calls are quite clear—answering and hanging up on all those calls can be a costly process in aggregate as we've seen previously—there are also costs to the caller. The caller is attempting to make sales via the spam call—it's most of the point of making the call in the first place—but what the caller may not have considered in using such a method is its impact on public perception. While spam calling may seem like an excellent marketing tool—it's automated, it works around the clock, it's always on-message—consider the effect it has for the business that uses it. Even if the business using spam calling has a terrific product, who will buy from the spam caller who broke into the workday to try to sell it? Granted, some sales efforts like “cold calling” require some of this, but usually there's an attempt made to set up a live meeting at a more convenient time, not as a means to make sales on the strength of brute force numbers.

Spam calls cost businesses a lot of money. Not only do those who receive such calls have to break into a work day and lose productivity to handle such calls, but those who use such calls suffer perception and credibility losses. There are means for companies to protect against spam calls, and there are better methods to try to make sales than calling at random in the middle of a work day. The end result here is that spam calls have high costs ... on both sides of the line.