Seems likely big businesses would be obvious targets for tons of unwanted phone calls, so how do they deal with this?
The spam calls are few and far between… when measured relatively against the fucking sales cold calls.
Avoid publishing important people’s direct phone numbers and force calls through a full time secretary or group of secretaries - if sales people call on direct lines notify them this is a private line and that you’ll block their number for repeat offenses. Make a note of the caller, company, and number - if they already have a strike refuse to do business with them… watch in glee as you slowly build up a black list of all telecom providers.
Sales cold calls are spam, 100%.
The spam calls are few and far between… when measured relatively against the fucking sales cold calls.
Insert meme from The Office find the difference between two pictures.
The VoIP services they subscribe to usually help with this to some degree in identifying common patterns to cut down on some of the spam.
Beyond that, businesses implementing call queues & bot menus is what helps cut down on the rest of it.
It’s becoming more rare to actually get in contact with a human from many businesses nowadays. Businesses seem to want users to use a bot that will help the customer do whatever it is they’re doing as much as possible.
And the only way to get to said human is through a series of menus and questions, usually confirming they actually are a customer.
Long gone are the days of calling and getting a human to give your information to.
When you call something like Bank of America, they prove you are a customer because you give them your account number or they recognize that based on your caller ID and also have to still provide SSN or date of birth, so even if someone spoofs an actual customer’s number, they’re stuck in the menu and never reach a human.
Can I get this for my personal number? 🤔
I don’t think so. Either that or it’s going to be pricey and not likely to work with a cell phone natively like how it is now with your wireless carrier.
One of my pervious jobs used RingCentral which is what I had in mind with my comment. They do have an iPhone and Android app that can send and receive texts and calls, but it’s all strictly through their app. I suppose you could do a forward to your number, but you’re going to need to have an existing number for that which kind of defeats this purpose.
You can manage call queues and the like on the backend in the browser to create something like this where it would send callers through a maze of menus to eventually be able to get to you.
Additionally, you could program a key press to you that wouldn’t be made known to callers such as pressing 7 to immediately be “transferred” to you (something you’d only tell trusted callers calling you) but that’s not stated in the call queue prompt.
I also imagine any business VoIP has a set minimum of numbers/users to sign up with them since they’re really for business, not personal use. But hey! Give it a shot and see or try one of their competitors.
Kind of an interesting thing to think about since you mentioned it.
Great idea re: having a number that only certain people know to use to get transferred directly!!
You want to look up “call screening services”. I’m afraid I can’t help more than that, since I personally have never used any.
