by Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner
People keep saying that AI has made outreach fast and easy. And in one sense, perhaps, that’s true. It makes sending messages almost effortless. It can help you find contact information, dial at scale, and craft scripts or voicemail messages that feel personalized (at first glance, anyway).
But reaching out was never the hard part; successfully making contact was.
And there’s an argument to be made that making contact today is actually harder than ever.
How Technology Is Creating New Challenges for Business Communications
When contacting everyone costs nothing, everybody does it. Every inbox, phone line, and social feed suddenly becomes clogged with messaging – some of it generic, some of it customized but still recognizable as AI once you know what to look for.
Providers and regulators have responded with increased scrutiny to protect their customers, often using automated systems themselves in order to handle the sheer volume of communications they need to monitor.
This is especially evident among telecom carriers, which use algorithms to scrutinize calls on their networks for anything that looks like spam. These filters indeed catch a lot of it. But false positives are also incredibly common. 81% of businesses report revenue loss from the spam flags these carriers can assign to their numbers.
And of course, people still filter too. Email open and reply rates are rapidly declining, and most customers won’t even answer calls from a number they don’t recognize, resulting in call answer rates that have slipped significantly, in some cases, to the low/mid single-digits.
Why Trust Is the Solution to Connecting Consistently
In a world this noisy, the key to reaching people is trust. Algorithms are more likely to let your communications through when they trust your reputation. People are more likely to engage when those communications appear legitimate. Building that trust is the most important thing a business can do to keep connecting with customers.
I run two companies that deal directly with this new reality: PhoneBurner, a power-dialing platform for outbound teams, and ARMOR, the call deliverability and number reputation protection service that I founded. Here’s what my experience has taught me about how every business needs to be earning trust in a world increasingly driven by AI.
Earning Trust from Gatekeepers (And The Algorithms They Use)
The systems that scrutinize your outreach efforts decide whether your communications seem trustworthy before customers even get that chance. I’ve seen this firsthand with telecom networks, so that’s the example I’m going to use here.
Carriers use algorithms to flag numbers based on calling patterns and other signals, and they update these methods constantly as spam tactics evolve. What’s more, the sheer volume of spam and scam calls in recent years has made them increasingly aggressive.
This means legitimate businesses can get flagged too, and not always as collateral damage. High call volume to outdated numbers, inconsistent caller ID information, short call durations or contacting people who never opted in can trigger the same flags as genuine bad actors, even when the business behind them is legitimate. They end up dealing with spam labels, warning tags that obscure their business information, or calls that get blocked before the recipient’s phone ever rings Many companies never notice until these problems are having a significant impact on their ability to reach customers.
The lesson here is that just being legitimate isn’t enough on its own. You have to earn trust continuously, both by protecting your reputation with each provider and by making sure your own calling practices hold up. That means clean, accurate contact lists, reaching people who actually expect to hear from you, and treating your reputation with each different provider as an asset you actively manage.
Monitor your business numbers for spam flags so you can identify and take timely steps to remediate them. Verify that your business information is displaying properly on calls. And keep your call processes and engagement patterns in focus because carriers are watching and consumers can provide feedback in the form of complaints, blocks, and hangups.
I founded ARMOR® to help organizations improve the deliverability of their outbound calls by monitoring their numbers for spam flags, providing best practice guidance, and delivering expert remediation to clear false spam flags with the carriers who assign them. But the principle holds true for other channels as well.
Treat your reputation like you’d treat your credit score. It slips if you ignore it, and you need to keep it strong if you want a chance to reach people at all.
Earning Trust from Humans
Getting past automated filters is only the first step. Each person you reach out to still has to decide whether you’re worth their time.
AI can help you scale up the quantity of your outreach, but it’s not as useful for improving the quality. It might allow a sales team to quickly scrape a lot of contact information from a database or list, but that doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of the data or the quality of the leads. It might make it faster than ever to send a flood of generic messages or move through a list with an AI voice agent. But these aren’t usually the best ways to earn trust.
The principle here isn’t new. Many businesses have been acquiring poor-quality leads and burning through their good ones with spray-and-pray outreach since long before AI arrived. But by lowering the effort required for these unhelpful approaches, AI has allowed them to overwhelm the channels legitimate businesses also rely on, and this has made customers more skeptical about the business communications they receive.
But one major upshot of living in a world where AI is everywhere is that people now value real human connections more than ever. This is why I made a strategic decision at PhoneBurner to make one-to-one power dialing – which keeps alive human agent in control of every call – our primary focus. Higher volume and multiline dialing have utility too, but optimizing our most human-centric dialing experience was foundational to our brand.l. It’s the best way to earn trust.
AI can still support your business communications, but it’s best to leverage it in ways that support human-to-human interactions instead of using it to replace them. This can also help solve the contact info quality problem I identified earlier. For example, PhoneBurner’s Connect Scores help reps identify the contacts most likely to answer their calls so they can focus their outreach efforts, but the actual conversation still occurs between two humans. It’s not about avoiding AI; it’s about using it strategically to foster connections..
Enhance vs. Replace: Using AI to Build Trust in Human Interactions
I apply the same principle to both of the companies I run, and it’s the closest thing I have to a rule for building trust in an AI-driven world: find where technology is eroding real connection, protect the human part that’s hardest to automate effectively, and use AI to support that element instead of standing in for it.
AI raised the ceiling on what any of us can produce, but buried all of us in noise as a result. That means the businesses succeeding in this new era aren’t the loudest or the most automated. They’re the most trusted, not only by the systems that decide whether they get through, but also by the people who decide whether or not to engage. Connection, not volume, needs to be what you’re aiming for. And in a crowded landscape that’s changing faster than ever, trust is the north star that will guide you there.
Chris Sorensen is the CEO of PhoneBurner, a power-dialing platform used by outbound sales teams worldwide, and the founder of the ARMOR® service, a call deliverability and number reputation solution for legitimate businesses. He writes about sales, communication technology, and building businesses people can trust. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
