Anura PR Team
Lead generation sounds easy enough. A brand creates a marketing campaign that drives visitors to a landing page, visitors fill out a form to express their interest in the brand’s products or services, a representative calls the lead, and after they answer a few questions—BOOM! A sale is made. The marketing team can report a positive result, the sales rep earns a commission, and the consumer is pleased with how easy the whole process was.
In reality, it rarely works this way. Of course, there are the central characters—the marketers, representatives, and consumers we’ve already mentioned. But there are also a lot of behind-the-scenes players, including lead sellers, lead buyers, fraud detection and prevention partners, and contact centers. And for the most part, they’re all trying to do their best to keep up with a lot of moving parts, like regulatory and compliance concerns and new fraud schemes to make sure they are generating quality leads.
The more touchpoints involved, the more opportunities for something to go wrong. That’s why it’s essential to work with partners who can trust each other and are equally committed to doing things the right way every step of the way. They all can and should work together to create a better lead generation world. This reduces the number of fraudulent leads while helping lead buyers and brands stay compliant.
It’s Only One Bad Lead. What Can Possibly Go Wrong?
Let us count five major things that happen when you buy a bad, fraudulent lead:
- You water down your marketing ROI because you’ve spent money on a lead that will never convert to a sale.
- If you call enough of those leads, you can create a brand reputation issue.
- Your call center resources are wasted: your representatives are dialing the phone, calling somebody that isn’t answering because they didn’t fill out a form and aren’t expecting the call.
- You’re killing your call center’s morale. They’re spending a lot of time trying to call people who are not interested in your products or services. Consumers are fed up with unwanted robocalls, so by that time, if they answer, they’re angry and your representatives get the brunt of that frustration. If this happens often, it can cause your team to lose confidence and close even “good leads” at a lower rate.
- And last but certainly not least, since that “bad lead” didn’t fill out the form, they also didn’t provide consent. So, every time a representative calls their number, they commit a TCPA violation. And when that happens, that could cost you a lot in fines or lawsuits.
A solid fraud detection and prevention solution, paired with a contact center compliance partner, can help you avoid these bad things so you can focus on the positive outcomes.
Contact Center Compliance Matters
Do you fully understand all the TCPA requirements? What about “mini-TCPA” state-level regulations? If you think you know them all today, you might not tomorrow.
Things are constantly shifting, and it’s a lot to keep up with from state to state. But still, a good contact center compliance platform, such as technology from DNC.com, can simplify your processes and protect your organization from TCPA and DNC violations, plus the resulting fines and lawsuits.
The product team at Contact Center Compliance, led by Isaac Shloss, conducts independent research to help them stay aware of and prepare for pending regulations. In addition, the company is involved with industry trade groups such as REACH, PACE, and Consumer Consent Council, which advocate on behalf of the lead generation industry. The company not only leverages these resources to develop products that help their customers stay compliant, but they also educate their customers on any changes.
In addition to keeping up with regulatory issues, a contact center compliance partner can help you maintain the accuracy and health of your customer database by constantly refreshing the information and making sure leads remain in compliance. But before a lead even gets entered into your database, you want to make sure it’s a good lead: a real person with a real interest in your products and services, providing real contact information and real consent. Your fraud detection and prevention partner is the first step to keeping it real.
A Dollar Is a Dollar… But Four Quarters Are Better Than One Hundred Pennies
Brands and lead buyers often focus on the number of leads. After all, the more leads you have, the more chances you have to make a sale, right? But a smaller number of quality leads can save you time and provide better results than a long list of bad leads.
As a fraud detection and prevention provider, Anura’s job is to identify that the contact information is collected from an actual human who wants to learn about your products and services—not a bot or someone from a human fraud farm.
To borrow a phrase from our marketing friends, we’re at the very top of the lead funnel. We focus only on who’s behind the keyboard and whether the information entered is real or fake. And we know that about 25% of the traffic and leads we see are fake.
We are also involved in related trade organizations and stay on top of TCPA regulations and compliance issues because we know those issues are important to our clients. We can best support the lead generation industry by concentrating on the areas we know best: detecting and stopping invalid traffic and fraudulent leads.
Catch our full conversation with Isaac Shloss, chief product officer for Contact Center Compliance, to learn how integrating with Anura’s fraud prevention solution offers better compliance protection for their customers.
Contact Center Compliance and Fraud Detection and Prevention: Even Better Together
You may use multi-factor authentication to log in to your online accounts. Your home probably has a smoke detector and a fire extinguisher. You may like chocolate and peanut butter, but you may love them even more when they’re combined.
When it comes to good leads and maintaining compliance, integrated protection brings two layers together for better lead generation results. An example of Contact Center Compliance and Anura working together are products like a trust call remediation product that can help monitor the reputation of your organization’s caller ID and whether your calls are verified or identified as potential spam by the recipient’s carrier.
There are a lot of factors that go into how your calls are designated, and the lead source is one of the major ones, especially for Contact Center Compliance customers that are calling into something called honeypots. Honeypots are unsweet traps or decoys set up by app companies, mobile carriers, or other entities trying to identify bad actors calling numbers they shouldn’t be calling, indicating they aren’t doing their due diligence before dialing.
There are also lead fraud honeypots that attempt to trap telemarketers. For example, lead forms are completed with abandoned phone numbers that are known to receive a lot of unsolicited calls. When a telemarketer follows up on that lead, the call is tracked as unsolicited, even though the company has the completed form and opt-in consent. This information is then used in TCPA lawsuits.
These situations are where Contact Center Compliance asks Anura to help protect their customers by identifying fraudulent activity to avoid becoming entrapped.
Anura’s fraud detection and prevention solution protects organizations from invalid traffic and fraudulent visitors, helping them improve their marketing ROI while decreasing the likelihood of getting dragged into a TCPA lawsuit.
How can Anura help protect your company from fraud and possible compliance violations?
Our free trial can show you how much fraud you have and where it comes from.
