Do Not Call Scrub and Blacklist Built Into the CRM

A customer who asked you to stop should vanish from every screen a rep can see. The blacklist does that, and it checks the national registry before the next call goes out.

The Do Not Call Blacklist is the one list in LeadLocate CRM that every other list obeys. A contact added to it, by name, phone or email, is hidden from every CRM view: the Leads list, the Contacts list, the SMS and email inboxes, the recipient lists for bulk texting and bulk email. A rep does not have to remember that a customer asked to be left alone, because the rep never sees the customer again. That is what a blacklist should mean, and it is the difference between a policy and a control.

The page does three more things. It imports an existing do not call list from a CSV of name, phone and email, so a store's accumulated opt outs from a previous system load in one upload. It blocks in both directions, so a number on the list that texts or calls in is stopped at the door and the page counts how many times it was stopped, which is how the blacklist doubles as a spam filter for the store's tracking numbers. And it runs a live do not call lookup on a number, checking it against the national registry and reporting the line type, so a rep can confirm a number's status before a call rather than after a complaint.

The buying side of this subject is on the counterpart pages: what a dealership CRM with built in lead generation owes a store in consent handling, and what an automotive CRM with call recording gives a store as a record. This page is the control itself.

A customer replies to a follow up text on a Monday morning with two words that mean stop. The rep who gets the reply opens the lead and clicks Blacklist from the row actions, next to In Store Now, Print and Delete. The CRM warns that the contact will be hidden from all CRM views, the rep confirms, and the customer is gone from the rep's screen, from the BDC's queue, from the manager's list and from the bulk text scheduled for Thursday. Nobody has to send an email to the team asking them not to contact this person. The system already did.

That afternoon the BDC manager is preparing an equity mining campaign to a list of past customers imported last week. Before building the recipient list she opens Billing and Admin, then DNC Blacklist, and uses the lookup on the handful of numbers she is unsure about. Two come back on the national registry; she adds them with Add to Blacklist, and the Pull Name button fills in the name from the number so she does not have to type it. When the campaign goes out, the blacklisted contacts are not on it, because they are not on anything.

On Wednesday the store's main tracking number gets a run of junk texts from a number that is clearly a robot. The manager adds it to the blacklist and the two way block takes over; the next twenty attempts never reach an inbox, and the Spam Blocked count on the entry shows twenty when he checks Friday. The reps never saw the noise, which is the point of a blacklist that works in both directions.

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The page is under Billing and Admin in the main menu as DNC Blacklist, next to Lead Feeds Manager, Automated Templates, Follow Up Processes and User Management. Its title is Do Not Call Blacklist, and it is a table of every blocked contact with the contact, who added it, an activity column, a blocked marker and the spam count for entries that have stopped inbound traffic. Above the table are Add New, which opens the Add to Blacklist form with Contact Name, Contact Phone and Contact Email fields and the Pull Name button, and Import, which opens Import DNC Blacklist.

The import accepts a CSV with columns for Name, Phone and Email in that order, dragged onto the page or chosen with Browse Files. The live lookup runs from the phone field: enter a number with its country code and the page reports the line type and the national registry status beneath the field. Removing a contact from the list asks for confirmation and warns that the contact will reappear in Leads, Contacts and Inbox views, because un-blocking is a decision, not a click.

The other place the blacklist appears is everywhere a contact is. The Blacklist action sits on the lead row and on the contact, so a rep blocks a customer from the record where the request arrived rather than walking to an admin page. On the phone app, a blacklisted contact is simply absent from the Leads view and the SMS inbox, the same as on the desktop.

Without a blacklist a store honors opt outs with memory and good intentions. A rep writes DO NOT CALL in a note field, which the next rep does not read. The BDC keeps a spreadsheet of numbers to avoid, which the bulk texting tool never consults. The manager sends an email to the floor about a customer who complained, which is forgotten by the following week. Each of these fails in the same way: the request lives in one place and the contact attempts come from five.

Some stores pay a separate service to scrub lists against the national registry before each campaign, which works for campaigns and does nothing for the individual text a rep sends on Tuesday. Others buy a compliance add on for their CRM that flags contacts but does not hide them, which leaves the decision with the rep at the moment the rep is least likely to check. The LeadLocate blacklist hides the contact from every view and every list, checks numbers live against the registry, and imports the store's existing opt out list in one upload, all inside the CRM the reps already use, at no additional cost.

The value of an honored request is hard to see until it is not honored. A customer who asked to be left alone and got a text anyway is a complaint at best. A blacklist that removes them from every screen turns that risk into a non event, and the record of when they were added and by whom is the store's answer if the question is ever asked.

The lookup is built into the phone field on the Add to Blacklist form. A rep or manager enters a number with its country code, and the page reports two things beneath the field: the line type, so a landline is distinguished from a mobile, and whether the number appears on the national do not call registry. The check runs on demand, against a current source, rather than against a copy the store downloaded months ago.

What a store does with the result is a store decision, and the CRM does not make it for you. A number on the registry that belongs to a customer with an existing relationship to the store is a different case from a number on the registry that came in on a purchased list, and the store's own policy decides which calls are appropriate. The lookup gives the rep the fact before the call; the blacklist gives the store a way to act on it with one click. The caller ID and contact validation page describes the related tools that tell a rep who is calling and whether a number is live, and the Phone Validator is the tool for checking a whole list's numbers rather than one.

Texting and calling customers are regulated, and a store's defense is its process. The blacklist is the part of that process a store can point to. A contact added to it carries who added it and when, and the activity on the entry shows what was stopped. The import means the store's history of opt outs did not reset when it changed CRMs. The live lookup means a number's registry status was checked at the moment it mattered. And because every call, text, MMS, email and voicemail is written to one communications log on the lead, the store can show what was sent to a customer before the request, and that nothing was sent after.

The two way block matters for the store's own numbers as well. Tracking numbers that receive junk texts and robocalls clog inboxes and, worse, tempt reps to ignore the inbox. Blocking a source at the blacklist keeps the inbox honest, and the spam count on the entry shows the store what it is being protected from. The wider record keeping that supports a compliance program, call recording, transcripts and the communications log, is covered on the call recording and transcription page. A vendor who says its software makes a store compliant on its own is telling you something about the vendor; what this page gives a store is a control that works and a record that it worked.

The blacklist is on from the first day of the account and empty until the store fills it. The first task is the import: export the do not contact list from the previous CRM or the BDC's spreadsheet as a CSV with Name, Phone and Email columns, open DNC Blacklist under Billing and Admin, click Import, and drop the file on the Import DNC Blacklist panel. The contacts disappear from every view as soon as the import completes.

Then tell the floor where the Blacklist button is on the lead row, and make it the store's rule that a stop request is handled by that button and nothing else. Add the lookup to the BDC's habit before any campaign to a list of uncertain origin. For a store that wants more, such as an automatic block when a customer replies with a stop word, a scheduled scrub of every list against the registry, or a blacklist shared across a group of rooftops, it is available on request, and our team puts it in production for your dealership. The contact page is the place to describe it.

The blacklist is the hard stop; three other features are what it protects. Contact import brings the book of business in, and the blacklist import should run alongside it so the store's opt outs arrive with its customers. Bulk texting is the campaign the blacklist quietly scrubs. Merge duplicate leads keeps one record per customer, so a stop request on one record is not undone by a duplicate on another. And tracking phone numbers are the lines the two way block keeps clean.

The Do Not Call Blacklist is part of the LeadLocate CRM in every plan, including CRM Only. Plans are month to month and listed on the pricing page. The all features list shows where it sits among everything else in the platform.

What happens to a contact on the Do Not Call Blacklist?

The contact is hidden from every CRM view: Leads, Contacts, the SMS and email inboxes and the recipient lists for bulk texting and bulk email. Inbound messages and calls from a blacklisted number are blocked as well, and the entry counts how many were stopped.

How do I add a customer who asked to stop?

Click Blacklist on the lead row or the contact, confirm the warning that the contact will be hidden from all CRM views, and it is done. You can also open DNC Blacklist under Billing and Admin, click Add New, and enter a name, phone or email; Pull Name fills the name from the number.

Can I import my existing do not call list?

Yes. Open DNC Blacklist, click Import, and drop a CSV with Name, Phone and Email columns in that order onto the Import DNC Blacklist panel. The contacts disappear from every view when the import completes.

Does the CRM check the national do not call registry?

Yes. The phone field on the Add to Blacklist form runs a live do not call lookup on the number you enter, reporting its line type and whether it appears on the national registry. What the store does with that result is the store's own policy decision.

Can a blacklisted contact be restored?

Yes. Remove the entry from the Do Not Call Blacklist page. The CRM asks you to confirm and warns that the contact will reappear in Leads, Contacts and Inbox views.

Is the blacklist an extra cost?

No. It is part of the LeadLocate CRM in every plan, including CRM Only. Plans are month to month and listed on the pricing page.

The Do Not Call Blacklist is part of every LeadLocate plan, month to month. See a blocked contact vanish from every view and a number checked against the registry before the call.

Prefer to talk right now? Call or text 844-376-2274.