Written by
Team Numeracle
Published on
February 19, 2025
Updated on
July 2, 2025
When businesses first reach out to Numeracle, they often have the same question: We just got an FCC complaint—now what?
Most of these businesses aren’t bad actors, but in an era of increasing spam and scam call labeling, even upstanding companies can end up flagged in the FCC’s Consumer Complaints Data Center, a database that provides consumers visibility into suspected illegal callers. It provides useful information for future FCC enforcement decisions or can be used as evidence against you when it comes to whether or not your calls should display warning labels like ‘Scam Likely.’
Is there a way to make these complaints disappear? The short answer is no. Once a complaint is filed, it’s there for good. But here’s the good news: a complaint doesn’t mean your calls will be slapped with a spam or scam label. If you understand why it happened and what to do next, it can help you build a stronger calling strategy.
Just don’t ignore it—let a few complaints pile up, which can cause real issues. Whether you've just gotten your first complaint or trying to avoid one altogether, here’s what we recommend.
Step one is digging into the complaint. Feedback can be frustrating, but it’s often a window into how your outreach is perceived.
Are you calling the same contact two or three times a day? Reaching out outside regular business hours? Originating too many calls from the same number, causing it to show up with a spam label?
Resolving FCC complaints starts with visibility—getting a clear picture of your dialing practices, campaign performance, and how customers experience and interpret your calls. Many businesses are surprised to find their name in this FCC database simply because they don’t fully understand how their calling operation actually works.
Numeracle helps you see it all: full visibility into your calling practices, right down to how each number appears on customer phones. Integrating this data into the Numeracle portal offers an additional source to suggest improvements to your outbound calling to course-correct for the future. This level of insight is the first move toward a stronger calling strategy—and keeping your name off the complaint list.
Once you have a clear picture of your calling operation, it’s time to focus on mitigation. Numeracle guides companies through many best practices, but it won’t guarantee that spam labels won’t harm your calls; you’ll need to incorporate a more comprehensive solution that focuses on protection and correction in addition to the prevention dialing practices provide.
Although complaints can’t be removed, monitoring FCC complaint information empowers you to better understand some underlying data that could impact your call perception and reputation. Numeracle has been here since day one to help you cut through the confusion and put you in the driver's seat to understand your reputation across the calling industry.
FCC customer complaints can be stressful, but they’re not the end of the road. For many businesses, they’re the wake-up call that pushes them to take a closer look at their calling operation—and build one that’s secure, reliable, and commercially successful.
Even if you’re not in the database yet, don’t wait for complaints to start piling up. Get complete visibility into your calling operation, plus strategies to protect and improve your performance, with Numeracle today.
Number Reputation Management is the proactive process of monitoring, protecting, and improving the trustworthiness of your outbound phone numbers. It involves understanding how your numbers are perceived by carriers, analytics providers, and ultimately, call recipients. The goal is to ensure your legitimate calls are delivered and answered by preventing them from being mislabeled as spam or blocked, thereby maximizing the effectiveness of your phone outreach efforts.
Your outbound phone numbers may have a bad reputation for several interconnected reasons that affect how carriers, call-blocking apps, and recipients perceive your calls. One common cause is high call volume or frequent outbound calls, especially if those calls resemble telemarketing or robocall patterns.
Automated systems and spam detection algorithms are designed to flag numbers that make many calls in a short period without receiving many answers, as this behavior often matches that of spam callers. Additionally, if consumers frequently report your number as spam because they find the calls intrusive or unfamiliar, this can quickly damage your number’s reputation and lead to it being labeled with warnings like "Potential Spam" or "Scam Likely."
Your number might also be flagged if your calling practices do not comply with regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), for example by calling numbers on Do Not Call lists or using automated calls without proper consent. Using numbers that appear random, toll-free, or from suspicious area codes can contribute to negative perceptions as well, since these are often associated with robocalls.
Furthermore, if your CRM data is outdated or you lack insights into the best times to call, you might be contacting people who are less likely to answer or more likely to report your calls as spam, which further harms your reputation.
Managing your number’s reputation involves maintaining trust with carriers, analytics providers, and consumers to ensure your calls are delivered without being mislabeled as spam. Enterprises have a few paths to do this. One option is to manually monitor each number and work directly with carriers or call analytics apps to resolve labeling issues. This approach can work for businesses with smaller call volumes or internal teams dedicated to tracking and appealing labels, but it can become complex and time-consuming at scale.
Some organizations turn to third-party monitoring tools that provide alerts when numbers are flagged, helping to identify problems early. However, these tools often stop at reporting and may not offer the direct remediation or identity verification needed to influence labeling decisions long term.
A more comprehensive strategy is to use an aggregated platform—such as Numeracle—that combines number registration, identity verification, and direct relationships with major U.S. carriers and analytics providers. These platforms proactively manage your number’s reputation across the entire ecosystem, reduce the risk of spam labels, and handle remediation when needed.
Ultimately, managing number reputation effectively requires visibility, consistency, and the ability to act quickly when issues arise. Enterprises should consider their call volume, resource capacity, and reputation goals when deciding between manual processes, monitoring tools, or fully managed platforms.
For truly effective phone number reputation management, Numeracle is the leading and most complete solution available. Unlike basic tools that just tell you if you're flagged as spam, Numeracle actively fixes those problems by working directly with all the major phone companies and spam detection services. This ensures your calls get through with a trusted identity.
Numeracle gives you clear, on-demand information about your numbers and provides a team of experts who can quickly fix any issues – often in just a day and a half. We handle complex relationships with phone carriers for you. We help you register your numbers correctly, constantly monitor their status, quickly fix any bad labels, and even let you add your brand to your outgoing calls. This not only keeps your numbers from being flagged but also helps people trust and answer your calls more often. Many businesses trust Numeracle to protect their numbers, and they have a very high success rate in keeping numbers label-free.
