Thomas Hoffman
“Hello. Jonathan.” Every monotone, computerized voice call coming to my phone always starts the same. “You owe the IRS money, but don’t forget to call us to receive the large sum of money that you’ve just inherited. Also, don’t forget to vote for candidate Y this election season.” Indeed, that is the greatest hits of the pestering robocall SPAM that me, my colleagues, and chances are high that you too have the privilege of receiving time and time again.
At this point, some of you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking, “Yeah okay, Jon, but you have no right to complain. You work for a robocalling company!” Yes, I do work at Call-Em-All, a company dedicated to helping people communicate important through automated voice and text messages. I’m proud to be here, too! This may seem a bit ironic at first, but hear me out because most don’t know that Call-Em-All is actually a force for good, not evil.
SPAM is bad, but automated messaging really helps people.
Now it’s one thing to preach openly about good intentions and quite another to live those convictions out loud, so I want to provide a glimpse at how a robocalling service like ours can be good. At Call-Em-All, when a potential user comes to our team looking to use our service, one of the first items we cover with them is how they are hoping to use our services as well as an explanations of the types of calls we do not send. Should the calls in question be of the type that we can service, fantastic! Welcome to the Call-Em-All family! Should the calls be of a kind that go against how we operate, then that’s the end of the discussion, no matter how nice of a business opportunity for Call-Em-All it may be.
There is no way around it: Call-Em-All does not transmit broadcasts of a promotional nature, those that could lead to a financial transaction, or mass political calls.
Around the clock every day of the year, Call-Em-All’s Customer Experience team actively monitors and reviews calls going out on our platform to ensure that our guidelines are being met. There is a zero tolerance policy among our staff in an effort to not only protect ourselves, but to also protect our users who truly have valuable, time-sensitive, even emergency-based information that needs to be communicated. Our President, Brad Herrmann, even went the extra mile to meet with representatives from the FCC, the very organization that regulates mass-communication, to ensure that our model was by the book and that our usage was deemed appropriate in their eyes.
Jason, one of our Customer Experience team members, had this to say about Call-Em-All’s activism in this arena: “True activism is not easy. In many cases it will cost a business… to be part of a cause. It takes actually caring in order for a business to successfully carry out true activism. Here at Call-Em-All, we invest a lot of time in both programming and customer support to battle these spam calls.”
Recently, the Wall-Street Journal wrote an article about robocalls, specifically about how easy it is to spam unsuspecting people with unwanted phone calls. It was a truly insightful, investigative piece that speaks volumes in relation to the robocalling industry. I mention this because Call-Em-All was brought up in the article. As its author discovered, when someone creates a Call-Em-All account, we ask them to agree to our Terms of Use which highlight the types of calls that cannot, under any circumstance, go out over our platform. In this instance, the author of the Wall Street Journal article was able to send out a funny test broadcast to a few friends, but her second attempt was blocked by our system.
Should someone lie about their intentions, our safety nets are still in place to ensure bad, unwanted spam calls will not go out with Call-Em-All’s help. Like many things Call-Em-All related, my team feels immense pride being the good guys of the industry.
Should you ever find yourself in Call-Em-All’s offices, you’ll find our Manifesto – a living document written by our employees documenting the very principles upon which we stand – painted upon one of our walls. There is one line in particular that speaks volumes on the type of person, and company, every member of our team aspires to be: “We use our powers for good not evil.” We are proud that our processes stop unwanted spam calls before they start. It’s why we’re able to go to sleep at night. We know that the messages transmitting around the clock aren’t computers asking for fake monies owed to the IRS, informing others of fake inheritances waiting to be collected, or telling others who they should vote for in the next election, but information that our users wants to send and their audiences want to receive.