With technology, there are many ways to screen inbound calls these days. No one wants to answer a telemarketer's call or even a wrong number. It is frustrating to have our time wasted with these types of calls when we could be doing something else. The good news is, that there are options available that can help us avoid these types of calls altogether.
In this article, we will discuss what call screening is, how it works, and the different ways you can use it to your advantage.
What Does Call Screening Mean?
Call screening is the process of identifying and verifying the identity of an individual or business before allowing a call to be connected. This can be done manually, by asking the caller to state their name and purpose for calling, or automatically, using caller identification (Caller ID) information to match against a database of known numbers. Also, some phone systems have the ability to screen inbound calls based on the originating local phone number, blocking calls from certain area codes or exchange prefixes. It can be used to protect your privacy, reduce telemarketer and robocaller harassment, and prevent unwanted spam calls from getting through.
Benefits of Call Screening
As the world becomes more and more connected, businesses and individuals are finding new ways to use call screening to their advantage. Some perks include:
For Small Businesses
1. Enhances Productivity
By screening calls, businesses can ensure that only the most important calls are put through to employees. This can save valuable time and increase productivity.
2. Reduced Call Abandonment Rate
Once a call is screened and deemed important, it is less likely to be abandoned by the receiver.
3. Improved Conversions
Conversion rates improve when agents are able to prioritize wandering customers. This allows businesses to ensure they provide relevant information to potential customers.
4. Enhanced Caller Experience
By screening calls, businesses can provide a better experience for their customers by ensuring that they are speaking with the right person and that their call is not being transferred multiple times.
For Residential
1. Privacy and Security
Call screening can help to protect your privacy by allowing you to screen calls before answering them. This can be especially useful for blocking unwanted calls from telemarketers or unknown numbers.
2. Fewer Spam and Robocalls
By screening calls, you can reduce the amount of spam and robocalls you receive by only answering calls from numbers you recognize.
3. Blocking Unwanted Calls
Call screening also allows you to block unwanted calls from specific numbers. This can be useful for blocking nuisance callers or telemarketers.
Call Screening Services with Community Phone
Call screening has become indispensable and unavoidable with the rise in spam calls year after year. Of the 68.4 million Americans who fell prey to phone scams in 2022, 61% were duped by robocallers. With spammers attacking vulnerable people relentlessly, Americans lost an average of $577 per person in 2022.
Switch to Community Phone, a wireless home phone service that offers the best call screening, spam blocker service, and other complementary features that can help you save time, increase productivity, and protect yourself from scams and fraud.
Read on to learn more!
Community Phone - Your Best Bet Against Fraud and Scam
Community Phone, the best landline, business, and cell service provider in the US, connects your phone to local cell towers for a dial tone via their landline base. The revolutionary design of the landline base and partnership with nationwide carriers ensures you get solid coverage and superior voice quality across 99% of the US.
Enjoy fantastic connectivity, unlimited nationwide calling, and features like call waiting, call forwarding, spam call blocking, caller ID, voicemail, and more in rural and low-reception areas at affordable prices.
How It Works
The Community Phone landline base connects your phone to local cell towers for a dial tone, eliminating the need for an internet or copper connection. The built-in antennas on the base amplify signals from the mobile towers to ensure you get top-notch voice quality and coverage in rural and low-reception areas.
Stay connected with loved ones and emergency services during power outages, as the 12-hour battery backup on the base ensures your phones continue working during blackouts.
Robust Call Screening & Blocking With Community Phone
Spammers and fraudsters target your number repeatedly if your number has been marked as a target or shared in the spammer's circle.
Community Phone offers 2 features that help you avoid and block unwanted and unlawful calls from alerting you.
1. Spam Blocker Services
2. Caller ID
1. Spam Blocker Services
Most landline providers do not offer spam-blocking services, leaving you with no option but to block them manually on your phone. With a 23% increase in spam calls in 2022 from 2021, there is a steady increasing trend in such attacks. Manual spam blocking, phone features, and *60 are no longer effective or efficient, as an average American receives between 12-25 spam calls weekly.
Get rid of unwanted calls, and protect yourself, your loved ones, or your business from scams with Community Phone's spam-calling blocking services:
a) Robocall blocker
b) The Safelist
c) Upcoming Additions - Safelist - 2 and the blocklist
a) Robocall Blocker
The robocall blocker can automatically detect spam, fraud, or robocalls and stop them before your phone rings.
How Does It Work?
1. When you receive a call to your Community Phone number, your phone won't ring right away. The caller will hear a recording that asks them to "press 1 to connect."
2. Robocalls work by sensing when the recipient picks up the phone and speaks. Once they hear a sound that isn't the sound of the phone ringing, the recording begins.
3. Since robocalls don't press buttons, the call will never reach your phone.
4. If an "unidentified caller" follows the instructions and your phone rings, you can let the call go to voicemail and respond to the voicemail if it's a legitimate caller.
b) The Safelist
****An ideal call screening and blocking feature for seniors, the Safelist protects your or a loved senior from being victims of a phone scam or fraud. Community Phone, the best landline phones for seniors, allows you to have a list of numbers you want to accept calls from. Your phone will ring to let calls from these numbers through and block all other calls. You can update the Safelist anytime to add or delete numbers.
Upcoming Additions
You can join the Community Phone waitlist for first access to these upcoming additions, like thousands of Community Phone subscribers.
c) The Safelist - 2
As data reveals, many people ignore legitimate calls fearing spam. Community Phone's Safelist-2 protects you from spam and allows you to return legitimate calls. You can choose the list of numbers from which you will accept calls. Your phone will ring to allow calls from these numbers, and Community Phone will route all other calls to a voicemail. You can check your voice messages and respond to them only if necessary.
d) The Blocklist
A more aggressive spam blocker, the Community Phone blocklist guards your landline number against known robocallers, scam calls, and telemarketers by checking each incoming caller's number against a regularly updated database known as the blocklist. You can contribute actively to this ever-growing database to protect yourself and other Community Phone customers from scams and fraud.
Talk to Community Phone specialists to learn more!
2. Caller ID
Incoming calls
****The caller ID feature helps you identify and answer the caller. However, callers need to fulfill specific prerequisites for you to see their name on your handset.
1. The caller should have enabled caller ID
2. They should include their name and number in the national database
3. Your handset should have the capability to display names, along with numbers.
If the caller does not enable caller ID or uses techniques like caller ID spoofing, and you cannot identify the caller, the best option is to avoid answering the call. You can allow the call to go to voicemail and respond to the voicemail only if necessary.
**
Outgoing Calls**
****You can enable caller ID on your Community Phone landline to ensure people do not ignore your calls as spam. Your number will show up on the recipient’s phone by default.
Community Phone Features for Households and Businesses
Voicemail
This feature is ideal when you are unavailable to answer calls or choose to avoid unidentified callers. Spammers or telemarketers will not leave a message which prevents you from engaging them and most likely not targeting you the next time.
You can set up the voicemail box in simple steps:
1. Dial 1
2. Press Call/Talk
3. Enter the passcode
4. Make a note of the passcode.
The Community Phone voicemail box has the capacity to store up to 30 messages, each with a recording time of 3 minutes. The Voicemail full alert on the landline base helps you manage your voicemail box efficiently and delete messages you don’t need or are spam.
Call History
Enable the call history feature and access information on incoming and outgoing calls to and from your Community Phone landline.
You can use this feature to
1. Return missed calls from known contacts
2. Store legitimate contacts
3. Check caller information against known contacts
4. Send a message or
5. Block spam calls.
3-way Calling
Speak with 2 or more of your loved ones on a 3-way call and share precious moments. If you are an employee working from home, use this feature to collaborate with team members and colleagues without worrying about patchy video calls or internet bandwidth.
Enhance customer satisfaction by patching the most appropriate person to help an irate customer with the 3-way calling feature. The possibilities are endless!
Landline Texting
Several studies reveal that texts are more successful than emails because of their delivery and open rates - 98% against 16-20% of emails. Stay connected with your loved ones by texting their number from your Community Phone landline. 2-way messaging lets you see the recipient's messages and continue engaging with them.
If you are a business, use the unlimited texting feature to engage with your customers or employees. Share offers and discounts, wish customers on special occasions, and collect feedback to enhance your business reputation and increase revenue. Send company announcements and personalized messages to employees when working remotely.
Call Routing
Route calls to the appropriate person or department with the Community Phone call routing feature. You can program several phones in your business to ring simultaneously so that an available representative can answer the call. The simultaneous ring feature could reduce wait times for your customers as they get an immediate response. If the person who answered the call cannot assist the customer, they can use the live call transfer feature or 3-way calling to better assist the customer, depending on the scenario.
If the first option does not fit your business needs, you can program your phones to ring sequentially if the first number does not answer or is busy. This way, the customer will be able to receive appropriate assistance. This feature can set up call distribution equally among several representatives in your organization. Repeat callers can be routed to the same representative, increasing customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Switching to Community Phone
Apart from being a wireless service provider benefitting thousands of Americans who want phones without internet, here are other benefits Community Phone members enjoy:
Unlimited nationwide calling and text: Stay in touch with loved ones, business associates, employees, and customers across the US with Community Phone's unlimited talk and text.
Utilize the unlimited time to resolve complex issues, launch marketing campaigns, engage with your customers, and decrease churn without a massive long-distance bill.
No internet needed: The Community Phone landline base works off cell towers without tying your phone to the internet. Since your phones are not dependent on the internet, they will continue working during an internet outage or maintenance.
No hidden charges: Community Phone does not surprise its customers with hidden charges or make you run from pillar to post to get them waived off. Thousands of their customers have been happy subscribers as they haven’t seen one more charge on their bill than they signed up for.
Zero-cost Installation: The landline base does not require a technician to install it. You or anyone in your business or household can install your Community Phone landline in under 30 seconds and be ready to make calls in 5 mins.
24/7 reliable customer support: Contact Community Phone customer support via phone, email, and live chat 24/7 to experience world-class support from live agents. Glowing customer reviews on BBB and Trustpilot are testimonials of their commitment to their customers.
Works during power outages: Stay connected with loved ones and emergency services as the 12-hour backup battery in the landline base ensures your phones continue working during power outages and blackouts.
How To Turn Off Call Screening?
There are a few different ways that you can turn off call screening. The steps include:
On Landline:
1. Pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone.
2. Press *60. If prompted, press 3 to turn the feature on.
3. Hang up the receiver. It will stay active until you deactivate it or disconnect your phone line.
On iPhone:
1. Open your Settings app and select Phone.
2. Tap the toggle switch next to Show My Caller ID to turn it off.
3. This will hide your phone number when you make calls until you turn the setting back on.
On Android:
1. Tap the gear icon on the bottom right to open settings.
2. Tap on "Call Screener."
3. Enable or disable the Call Screener by tapping on the toggle.
With these steps, you should now be able to disable call screening on your device! Doing so will stop any automated calls or salespeople from bothering you. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.
FAQs About Screening a Call
1. Is It Rude To Screen Calls?
Call screening is not inherently rude. In fact, many people use call screening as a way to manage their time and energy. If you are expecting an important call, you may want to screen calls so that you can answer the phone when the person you are expecting calls.
2. Is Call Screening The Same As Call Blocking?
No, call screening and call blocking are not the same things. Call screening allows you to see who is calling before you answer the phone, while call blocking prevents a caller from reaching you altogether.
3. What Phones Have Call Screening?
Most smartphones have some form of call screening built into their operating system. For example, iPhone users can activate call screening by going to their phone's unknown call settings and enabling the "My Caller ID" feature. Android users can also find similar call screening features in their phone's settings. You can also get screened calls with landlines.
Conclusion
Overall, call screening can be a very beneficial tool, whether you are a business owner trying to protect your employees from sales calls or an individual who is simply trying to avoid telemarketers and other nuisance callers. You can make the most of this powerful tool by understanding how the process works.
We hope this article has helped you better understand the call screening process. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. We're always happy to help!