Answer-Seizure Ratio is the share of call attempts that get answered — answered calls divided by total attempts. It is the number most closely tied to whether a campaign makes money, and when it drops the first instinct is to phone the carrier.
Sometimes that is right. Often it isn't, and starting there costs you a day. Work through these in order, because they are arranged from cheapest to check to most disruptive.
1. Did anything change on your side?
Obvious, and skipped constantly. Before anything else:
- New lead list loaded recently? A list with old or wrong numbers destroys ASR on its own, and it will look exactly like a route problem.
- Dialer settings changed — pacing, ratio, retry rules, drop timers?
- New CLI in use? A fresh number with no calling history is treated with suspicion by carrier analytics, and reputation takes weeks to build.
- Anyone adjusted the answering-machine detection thresholds? Aggressive AMD hangs up on real people and records them as unanswered.
2. Compare the same window, not the same number
ASR moves with time of day and day of week, sometimes by a lot. Comparing this morning to yesterday afternoon tells you nothing.
Pull the same hours from the same weekday a week earlier. If Tuesday 2–4pm this week is well below Tuesday 2–4pm last week, you have a real drop. If it only looks bad against your best hour ever, you may be looking at normal variation.
Also check whether the destination is in a holiday period. Answer rates fall off a cliff across the Gulf during Eid, in much of Europe through August, and around any national holiday. This catches people out every year.
3. Break it down by destination
An overall ASR figure hides more than it shows. Split it by prefix.
If one destination collapsed and the rest are steady, it is that route. If everything fell proportionally, look at your dialer, your trunk, or your list. If mobile fell but landline held, that points at mobile-specific filtering or a change in that operator's handling.
4. Look at the actual SIP responses
This is where the answer usually is, and where most people never look. Your switch records why each call ended. The pattern in those codes is close to a diagnosis:
| Code | Means | Suggests |
|---|---|---|
486 | Busy Here | Genuinely busy — or a network returning fake busy to shed load |
480 | Temporarily Unavailable | Phone off or out of coverage. A sudden spike suggests filtering |
503 | Service Unavailable | Carrier-side congestion or capacity. Escalate this one |
404 | Not Found | Number doesn't exist. High volume means a bad list, not a bad route |
603 | Decline | Actively rejected. Often blocking rather than a person declining |
487 | Request Terminated | You hung up first — check your ring timeout and pacing |
A wall of 404s is a list problem. A wall of 503s is a carrier
problem. A wall of 487s is a you problem: your dialer is giving up before the
phone has finished ringing. Fifteen seconds is too short for most international destinations;
thirty is more realistic.
5. Check whether your CLI is being blocked
Carrier-side analytics score calling numbers, and a number that suddenly generates high volume gets flagged. Once flagged, calls may be labelled as spam on the handset, silently filtered, or rejected outright.
Signs pointing this way:
- ASR fell on one CLI while another, dialling the same list, held steady
- A rise in
603or480with no other explanation - Calls connect but people answer confused, having seen a spam warning
Test it directly: call your own phone in that market from the CLI in question and see what the screen says.
6. Then talk to the carrier — with evidence
By this point you can make a specific, checkable claim instead of a complaint. Something like:
ASR on prefix 234803 fell from 61% to 34% between Tuesday and Wednesday, same hours, same list. 503s went from 4% of attempts to 31%. Other destinations unchanged. Sample CDRs attached.
That gets a route change investigated. "Our ASR is bad" gets you a support ticket and a week of waiting.
Ask directly whether the upstream on that prefix changed. Carriers reroute constantly, often without notice, and the honest ones will tell you.
What is a good ASR anyway?
There is no universal figure, and anyone quoting one is selling something. It depends heavily on your traffic:
- Conversational and support traffic — expected calls to people who want to hear from you. Rates run high.
- Cold outbound sales — much lower, and mostly a function of list quality and CLI reputation rather than route quality.
- Automated and OTP — depends almost entirely on the destination's own filtering rules.
The number worth watching is not the absolute value but the trend on your own traffic, destination by destination. Your ASR last month on the same prefixes is a far more useful benchmark than any industry average.
Take a baseline while things are working. Without one, you cannot tell a real problem from a bad afternoon — and you will spend both.
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