Spam Phone Calls Cost U.S. Small Businesses Half-Billion Dollars in Lost Productivity, Marchex Study Finds
February 18 2014 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
Spam phone calls are not only annoying, but expensive: new
findings released today show that U.S. small businesses lose nearly
half a billion dollars a year in productivity by handling
telemarketing and other unwanted calls, according to Marchex, Inc.
(NASDAQ: MCHX), a mobile advertising technology company.
The data illustrates that while the federal government’s
National Do Not Call Registry may offer consumers some relief from
spam, it leaves businesses exempt and unprotected.
Marchex aggregated data from nearly 40 million phone calls
blocked during 2013 to U.S. small businesses through its Clean
Call™ technology. The findings show:
- Spam calls are growing – fast. The
volume of detected and blocked calls jumped 162% from January 2013
to January 2014 and is on track to keep rising with the mass
adoption of mobile phones.
- Technology has made it cheaper and
easier for spammers to blast out up to tens of thousands of phone
calls in a matter of minutes.
- The average spam call lasts two
minutes. That’s due in part to spammers using more deceptive
practices to keep businesses on the phone longer.
- Answering spam calls wastes nearly 20
million hours a year for small businesses in the U.S. – which
translates to about $475 million annually.*
- Small businesses are more dramatically
impacted than large national businesses, which can direct incoming
calls at scale through call centers.
“Unlike spam emails, which can be ignored, spam calls are highly
disruptive and costly for businesses that rely on phone calls for
sales,” said Jason Flaks, Director of Product and Engineering at
Marchex. “This growing epidemic hits small businesses the hardest.
Fortunately, there are now solutions to address the problem
head-on.”
Who are phone spammers? Marchex has found they range from
computerized robocallers to more insidious fraudsters known as
“chipmunks.” Chipmunks – so named for their high-pitched, altered
voices – manipulate metrics in click-to-call campaigns by getting
businesses to stay on the phone for 30 seconds or more, which can
produce the illusion of a “good” customer call.
Marchex started aggressively going after spam calls in 2011,
after noticing the detrimental effect these calls were having on
businesses. Clean Call technology is now used by hundreds of
thousands of advertisers, and from a consumer perspective, the
system is invisible. The technology and algorithms – which detect
and block telemarketer, robocallers and other spam dialers – evolve
constantly to stay ahead of spam techniques, which shift at a
rapid-fire pace.
To further protect small businesses, Marchex also recommends
these calls to action: ask suspected spammers to immediately
identify themselves and the reason for their call; request to be
put on the telemarketer’s internal “do not call” list; and finally,
hang up if a caller won’t get off the line.
“Small businesses are vital to our national economy and they can
now take steps to reduce the amount of unwanted calls they get,”
Flaks said. “We will continue to innovate with new technologies to
stop spam from wasting valuable time for business owners and their
employees.”
*Estimation methodology used average hourly earnings from 2013
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
About Marchex
Marchex is a mobile advertising technology company. The
company provides a suite of products and services for businesses
that depend on consumer phone calls to drive sales. Marchex’s
mobile advertising platform delivers new customer phone calls to
businesses, while its technology analyzes the data in these calls
to help maximize ad campaign results. Marchex disrupts
traditional advertising models by giving businesses full
transparency into their ad campaign performance and charging them
based on new customer acquisition.
Please
visit www.marchex.com, blog.marchex.com or @marchex on
Twitter (Twitter.com/Marchex), where Marchex discloses
material information from time to time about the company, its
financial information, and its business.
Marchex Corporate CommunicationsSonia Krishnan,
206-331-3434Email: skrishnan(at)marchex.com
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