[wittedhaddock]

I work for a phone company, Community Phone, whose majority customers are seniors. We periodically check in with our customers over text message (helping make sure they achieve their goals, like using Uber, or whatever... which is our business: to enable an improvement in overall quality of life via phones, rather than phones in themselves). As a result, many of our customers FB message/call/email/text us as a sanity check any time they receive solicitation online. It's a service we happily provide, but it does require them to reach out to us, as opposed to us knowing when to intervene. Other than that, I will be monitoring this thread very closely for more general and automated solutions. Thanks very much for asking this question.

[jakecopp]

I've never imagined a phone company that aims to improve overall quality of life using phones, rather than just providing mobile service, fascinating to think about.

Are customers able to opt out of additional support and if so do any choose to?

[mcv]

I imagine it's not the cheapest phone company due to the additional service, so if you're not using it, you might be wasting money.

In any case, I think it's good that there are phone companies that compete on quality service rather than price, and specialised service for a specific demographic makes a lot of sense.

[wittedhaddock]

You don't have to imagine! We're $15 a month for unlimited talking and texting, and each gigabyte is $5. Or in other words, we beat Google Fi by $5. Support is our marketing budget, and it works rather well :)

[yingw787]

This sounds like a very useful and safe service; thanks for providing it!

[srndh]

I am not sure how this will work between "a company & a customer". But I would like filter my parents SMS, so that they can see messages from known & trusted contacts, while I can ensure that the messages from unknown sender is not spam. 95% of unknown senders are spam.

[wittedhaddock]

That pesky 5% can be really pesky though. Though if they naturally resort to POTS, like I would suspect, I have seen that compensate for potential shortcomings.

In the same way that a speech recognizer with 99% accuracy sounds amazing, and is a great technical achievement, is all the while still really hard to use if it misses 1 out of 100 phonemes...

[sergiomattei]

This is amazing... Great work.