The voice channel remains one of the most powerful ways for businesses to connect with customers. But today’s consumers are increasingly cautious. After years of robocalls, spoofing and fraud, many people simply won’t pick up unless they trust who’s calling.
However, Juniper Research believes 2025 may have marked the peak of robocalling fraud, indicating branded calling is genuinely working to reduce robocalls and fraud. With branded calling, businesses can add rich call content, including name, number, logo and reason for the call to the mobile display. Those calls are then authenticated to help ensure they aren’t spoofed. Branded calling helps businesses safely reach more customers while achieving their top business goals of improving the customer experience and increasing revenues.
Demand for branded calling is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. Juniper Research projects enterprise adoption will surge 1,720% between 2025 and 2030, reflecting just how urgently organizations are seeking ways to rebuild trust in the phone channel. But choosing a branded calling vendor can be challenging. The technology is complex and vendors often use inconsistent terminology — making it difficult to compare features or understand what you’re actually getting. And the consequences of choosing the wrong partner can be severe.
Following are five questions your business may want to consider when choosing a branded calling vendor to help protect your brand and customers — and meet your top goals. Download the full eBook for the top 10 questions!
1. Why do I need branded calling?
Caller ID was introduced in the US in the 1980s as a landline service, long before the introduction of mobile devices. Today, only a small percentage of subscribers who have premium mobile phone plans or opted into wireless Caller ID have an existing legacy Caller ID solution enabled on their phones. And when they do, the legacy Caller ID field only accommodates up to 15 characters, limiting the breadth of content that can be conveyed on the display. In addition, legacy solutions don’t include rich call content and/or call authentication.
This has created the need for a ubiquitous solution for businesses to add rich call content to the mobile display, alerting consumers as to who’s calling so they answer. Communications service providers (CSPs) often tell businesses they can add the caller name to their outbound calls by manipulating names associated with the phone numbers using the CSP’s platform. But that doesn’t actually work because other carriers in the path of the call don’t trust the data used by the CSP, so they drop the name before it’s displayed on the recipient’s device. Businesses may believe their Caller ID problem is solved, but in fact, the call content may never actually be delivered to consumers.
2. Does the service offer broad reach across the leading US mobile carriers?
Very few branded calling providers can offer extensive reach across the top three mobile carriers in the US: AT&T®, Verizon and T-Mobile®. It’s vendors with strong partnerships across multiple carriers that can ensure branded calls are delivered consistently, regardless of the recipient’s network. Also, there are other factors to consider when it comes to reach, including:
- Geographic coverage: The vendor’s reach can vary by region. It’s important to check if it has a strong presence in the areas where your target audience is located.
- Device compatibility: Effective branded calling solutions should work seamlessly across various mobile devices like smartphones and feature phones.
3. Does the service provider require consumers to download an app to implement branded calling?
Although many branded calling providers claim to deliver branded calling with rich call content today — that can be misleading. When working with certain vendors, consumers are required to download an app (over the top) to their mobile devices. However, historically it’s been shown consumers are reluctant to download additional apps.
As a result, those businesses that adopt solutions requiring an app are unable to deliver consistent experiences to their customers. Today, the top branded calling providers are implementing secure branded calling with rich call content at the mobile carrier network level and don’t require consumers to take any action at all to receive branded calls
4. My telephone service provider claims it will digitally sign my calls using STIR / SHAKEN call authentication. Why isn’t that sufficient to ensure the call wasn’t spoofed?
STIR/SHAKEN call authentication works by originating and terminating service providers verifying the caller is authorized to use the phone number. But for businesses trying to reach customers, there’s still a gap in call verification. That’s because businesses often use multiple voice carriers, and a call may traverse multiple networks that employ older voice networks which don’t support STIR/SHAKEN. In those cases, mobile service providers can’t tell if calls are legitimate, so the verification and rich call content is dropped before it reaches the recipient. Based upon our internal research, only 35% of business-to-consumer calls arrive with attestation.
To make sure the rich content gets to customers — and the call is valid and safe to answer — it’s necessary to add an additional layer of protection by introducing a STIR out-of-band, end-to-end verification process. With that approach, calls that aren’t verified may be blocked completely or delivered without caller name and rich content — protecting both the business and its customers from fraudulent branded calls.
5. How does the vendor ensure a business entity can be trusted and has the right to use a phone number and rich call content?
A foundational component to establish trusted branded calling services is the implementation of a holistic know your customer (KYC) process to instill confidence in consumers so they’ll answer the phone. The goal of KYC processes is to establish vetting best practices to ensure bad actors aren’t allowed into the telecom ecosystem — as well as industry partnerships to define and execute those best practices.
KYC best practices include vetting of the following elements:
- Calling entity legitimacy, purpose and standing of the business being branded on outbound calls to users
- Telephone number right-to-use–ownership, use and chain of custody of the calling entity’s telephone numbers
- Branding of rich call content (e.g., names, logos, call reasons) associated with the calling entity’s telephone numbers
Putting it all together
To recap, we suggest when implementing branded calling at your organization, you:
- Look for a trusted vendor with proven qualifications in branded calling.
- Find out what the actual reach of your branded calls would be if you engage a particular provider.
- Ask your vendor if it can deliver branded calling without the need for an app.
- Determine exactly how the provider you’re considering authenticates calls.
- Look for a vendor that can offer a robust, trusted vetting capability across the entire telecom ecosystem.
Read the full eBook, Branded Calling: Buyers Guide, for the 10 questions you should consider when choosing a vendor. And, learn how TransUnion Branded Call Display, part of our Trusted Call Solutions suite, aligns to your vendor checklist — so you can start improving engagement, enhancing customer experiences and increasing revenue.
