Branded Calling for Businesses

The benefits of positive customer experiences can be directly quantified in terms of retention and loyalty — and the phone which continues to be a popular and necessary communications channel for businesses — is essential to that experience. In fact, in a recent study, Forrester Consulting noted 47% of respondents ranked the voice channel as critical to meeting customer service goals, and 41% said it’s important.

With the smartphone penetration rate in the US reaching 97% in 2021, the mobile device offers a rare opportunity to reach more customers than ever before.

But because the phone’s so popular, it’s also ripe for fraud

Due to robocalls, scams and fraud, consumers are afraid to answer the phone. Based on our internal statistics, close to 90% of calls to customers go unanswered because they just can’t be sure who’s calling.

...a staggering 87% of survey respondents agreed with the statement, ‘The phone channel is the most important outbound contact channel.

Source: An Optimized Customer Contact Strategy Combines Transparency and Intelligence: The State of Outbound Communications in 2022, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, a TransUnion company, October 2022

$87 billion

Estimated loss to robocalls and phone scams in 2022 – a 116% increase from 2021

Nearly 86 million

Number of robocalls

1,317

Number of spam calls that were blocked or identified every second

Source: Robokiller Mid-Year Phone Report

When consumers don’t answer the phone or have negative call experiences, it leads to problems for enterprises, including:

Reduced answer rates and customer satisfaction
Increased costs and call volumes
Lost revenues
Reduced loyalty and retention

On the other hand, consumers miss important calls they really want, and experience more frustration and less trust in the brand and phone itself.

Here’s what consumers said in our survey:

73%

don’t answer calls from unknown callers because they assume it’s a robocall where someone is trying to sell them something

66%

are concerned it could be a scam

61%

Received at least one call where the caller seemed to be impersonating someone else (call spoofing) or was NOT who they claimed to be

38%

received more than three calls where the caller was not who they claimed to be

Read the eBook: Reaching Customers by Phone Feel Like a Fairy Tale?

Protect and promote your brand with branded calling

Through call spoofing, bad actors can impersonate your brand and use it to steal from your customers – resulting in fraud loss and reputational damage. With branded calling for businesses, you can protect your customers and brand while promoting your services and reaching more customers. Branded calling enables enterprises to add rich call content to calls — including name, logo, number and reason for the call — to the mobile display on iPhones or Androids, along with STIR/SHAKEN verification the call has not been spoofed.

Branded calling for businesses, part of a multichannel branded communications strategy, helps you:

PROTECT

Ensure brand reputation is safe from bad actors
Reduce spoofed calls and fraud
Improve loyalty and retention
Increase efficiencies to reduce costs
Resolve conflicts faster with your customers

PROMOTE

Reach more customers
More easily meet customer needs
Enhance engagement
Increase advocacy and recommendations
Encourage customers to buy additional products
Be consistent across digital channels

What is Branded Call Display

Our award-winning Branded Call Display (BCD) with rich call content is a form of branded communications that’s growing in popularity. BCD lets you add context to the mobile call display, including name, logo and reason for the call — so your customers know you’re calling and answer the phone. Calls also leverage STIR/SHAKEN authentication to help verify they aren’t spoofed.

Single, integrated platform

One-stop shop through a centralized caller identity management platform that makes managing branded calling easy and scalable

Unparalleled mobile reach

Your calls can reach nearly 280 million mobile devices and 90 million landlines across the US.

Award-winning portfolio

Juniper Future Digital Awards: 2022 & 2023
Telco Innovation: Platinum for Best Robocall Mitigation Solution
CCW Excellence Awards 2022: Disruptive Technology of the Year
TMC Customer Contact Center: 2022, 2023, 2024

Read the eBook: Five Reasons to Brand Your Calls

Five reasons to brand your calls

1. Improve engagement

Make sure your legitimate calls to customers don’t get marked as spam or blocked.

To communicate with customers, you must first be able to reach them. According to an Omdia Research recent study, 93% of respondents said over 10% of their outbound calls were blocked six months ago, up 8% from 85% who said more than10% of their outbound calls were blocked a year ago.

Top reasons customers don’t answer the phone, as cited by respondents in Forrester Consulting’s recent study, include:

Unknown caller
Call spoofing
Fraud
High call volumes

However, when calls are tagged correctly, fewer calls get marked as spam, blocked or labeled as “Unknown.” Our Trusted Call Solutions suite, which includes Branded Call Display, has been proven to decrease spam complaints by 90%–100%.

90%–100%

Decrease in spam complaints

Source: New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of TruContact Trusted Call Solutions Forrester, 2020.

2. Reverse revenue loss

Proactively safeguarding your brand reputation and helping ensure calls reach customers has added benefits. For instance, an enhanced customer experience can bring in new customers and lead to higher upsell potential and increased revenue. Quantified benefits of Trusted Call Solutions, including TruContact Branded Call Display (BCD), help you reverse revenue loss and increase income and ROI.

Address the root cause to increase revenues

The results of a recent Omdia study, Rebuilding Trust in Calls, 2nd edition (2022) are striking in that 93% of survey respondents said they lost up to 30% of revenue due to call blocking or mistagging in the last six months. That was higher than the last 12 months (57%).

In its report, New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact Of TruContact Trusted Call Solutions, Forrester also noted use of Branded Call Display was proven to help enterprises increase incremental income by 28%–32%.

28%–32%

Increase in incremental income attributable to Branded Call Display

57%

Respondents in an Omdia survey who said when their calls are blocked or marked as spam it has a high or extreme impact on call volumes — thereby increasing costs

62%

Respondents in a recent Omdia survey who said when their calls are blocked or marked as spam it has a high or extreme impact on costs

Source; Rebuilding Trust in Calls, 2nd Edition, 2022, Omdia Research

3. Enhance the experience and cut costs

Forty-eight percent of respondents in a recent Forrester Consulting study said the voice/digital experience is critical to meeting one of their top business goals of “improving the customer experience” and 39% said it’s important.6 And it’s no secret, a good CX positively impacts revenues.

Fostering customer loyalty means making it easy to do business with your enterprise. According to a Forrester study, “The ROI of CX Transformation,” improving a company’s average CX Index Score by just one point can lead to anywhere from $0.50 to $120 in incremental revenue per customer, depending on the industry.

Customer calls that get tagged as spam or blocked also impacts the CX and revenues — this time negatively.

4. Promote and protect your brand

Unfortunately, today’s bad actors can impersonate your brand and use it to steal from your customers, resulting in fraud loss and reputational damage. You can protect your brand reputation and improve customer engagement by authenticating your calls with STIR/SHAKEN using Branded Call Display to ensure customers receive a consistent brand experience across all channels — and to reduce call spoofing.

99%

of respondents in a recent Omdia survey said the customer call experience is important to their overall brand perception. (Read the study here)

5. Provide a consistent, multichannel experience

Why shouldn’t phone calls match your other digital channels? Businesses make continual adjustments to offer more positive, engaging and streamlined digital interactions. However, there’s a component of the customer experience that has been largely neglected — the phone call.

When your calls are consistent across the multichannel experience, you’ll resolve customer conflicts faster and improve brand loyalty. With branded calling, you’ll quickly scale that experience across carriers and devices.

Forrester Consulting study respondents said:

32%

The voice/digital experience is critical to meeting their top five CX goal of better aligning their digital and call strategies

45%

The voice/digital experience is important to meeting their top five CX goal of better aligning their digital and call strategies

Read the full report here: An Optimized Customer Contact Strategy Combines Transparency and Intelligence: The State of Outbound Communications in 2022, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, a TransUnion company

What is enterprise branded calling

Enterprise branded calling is among the most innovative, breakthrough business phone services today. The solution enables businesses across all industries to add context to the mobile display so customers recognize who’s calling — and ensure the call hasn’t been spoofed.

Initially, branded calling relied on the need for the consumer to download and configure a third-party app to enable the service. But because getting customers to download apps has typically been challenging, this led to very low adoption rates. The ability to offer branded calling ubiquitously hinges on ensuring call authentication occurs at a network level so only known, trusted entities get into the ecosystem.

Today, the industry is moving to a standards-based network approach coupled with rich call content. This eliminates the need for apps and enables the addition of even more context to the mobile display. That helps pave the way for a safer ecosystem where enterprises can reach more customers, consumers don’t miss important phone calls they really want, and fraudsters get the cold shoulder.

Such business phone services can include company name, location, logo, number, reason for the call and more, allowing consumers to know and trust who’s calling. With TransUnion Branded Call Display, customers also see a checkmark on their mobile displays, indicating the call has been verified by STIR/SHAKEN call authentication.

A key benefit of BCD is you only need to work with one company. We manage caller ID across over 850 carriers, and are trusted by leading brands and enterprises in financial services, government, healthcare, insurance, and more. Because we have such deep relationships, we do the heavy lifting with service providers for you.

This technology puts the power back in customers’ hands, giving them information they need to decide if they want to answer the phone.

Why is branding a calling important?

As noted in the Forbes Tech Council article by TransUnion SVP, James Garvert, according to the Federal Trade Commission, fraud losses topped $10 billion in 2023. Imposter scams — which grew 71% from 2021–2023 — were the top way consumers were defrauded. Fraudsters are committing increasingly sophisticated scams involving multiple channels — including phone calls, SMS, email and beyond — as part of a complex process to take advantage of consumers.

Imposter scams involve a fraudster pretending to be someone they’re not to steal money or information. Email was reported as the most commonly used method to reach consumers in the FTC report; however, the phone channel accounted for the highest per-person losses. That’s because the phone remains an incredibly popular communication channel for consumers who want that personal experience — and for enterprises that rank the phone as one of their top strategic tools for improving the customer experience.

With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), deepfake technology and large language models, phone scams have grown more complex, convincing and costly, going from $196 million in losses in 2020 to a whopping $660 million, a 237% increase just two years .

While bad actors are tapping into many channels, it’s the phone that’s the tipping point for consumers who often feel reassured enough by a human (or deepfaked) voice to click on a text or email link, or share a one-time passcode.

Today’s consumers are demanding more protection against unwanted calls and fraud, along with a way to trust phone calls again so they can safely answer calls they do want — calls from schools, healthcare organizations and more.

Enterprises, particularly financial institutions, are reporting fraudsters often jumpstart the scam by obtaining a consumer’s name, phone number and address through social engineering like phishing attacks or a data breach. Many of us have received an SMS or email with a message asking, “Did you make this payment?” Increasingly, the answer is “no.” It’s a scam.

But, if the consumer does respond, the fraudster then makes a spoofed call to them using the financial institution’s name, requests their user name, and resets their password. The bank, believing it’s a valid customer, then sends an OTP code to the consumer. The fraudster pretends the code is from the victim — thereby gaining complete access to their account.

While branded calling is a huge help, one caveat is branded calls without authentication and verification the call has NOT been spoofed may just be enabling more effective fraudulent calls. If someone convincingly spoofs a number with the logo of one of their trusted providers, the consumer may find it even more believable.

That means, only branded calls that are authenticated reach consumers.

We fully support that approach, particularly because our branded calling solution leverages rich call content to supplement the delivery of call authentication “Out-of-Band” — allowing the carrier receiving the call to verify it and retrieve the rich call content that will appear on the consumer’s mobile phone display.

Solutions are available to help enterprises securely brand their outbound calls and help prevent call spoofing. Those solutions are paving the way for a safer ecosystem where enterprises can reach more customers, and consumers don’t miss important phone calls they really want and need.

TransUnion surveyed consumers and here’s what they said about branded calling and top features:

57%

indicated ‘verification the call has not been spoofed’ is a top feature

76%

would be likely to answer calls from businesses with which they do business if they company displayed name and logo on calls to customers.

71%

Were interested in having the name of the caller (Caller ID service) on their mobile phones – the most important feature to respondents.

56%

would view a brand more favorably if it added its name and logo to the mobile display.

58%

would be somewhat or very likely to remain a customer of businesses that verify their calls have not been spoofed and provide name and logo of the caller on the mobile display.

close to 63%

said they’d pay for a service that verifies caller and company name, along with the number from which they are receiving calls. The good news – it’s free to consumers!

Does branded caller ID work?

Branded caller ID began as basic business caller ID (also called CNAM)— the ability to display business name or text associated with the outbound telephone number to customers. To do so, your number(s) must be registered in a central database; in the US, that’s CNAM.

The concept of business caller ID originated at a time when landlines were the primary tool for communication. Displaying a Calling Name with the incoming number allowed subscribers to identify callers before deciding whether to answer. While today’s communications have evolved (how often do you use a landline phone anymore?), caller ID has largely remained the same. And one key aspect of caller ID that hasn’t changed, and likely never will, includes the benefits to all parties.

Today, our communications devices and services have become an extension of our identity; we bring them everywhere and use them all day. To meet that demand, communications service providers (CSPs) go beyond standard Calling Name delivery to high-quality service that will benefit subscribers — both enterprise and consumer.

Such high-quality Caller ID services tap into better data to more accurately identify callers and reduce call spoofing.

And with new capabilities like authentication, personalization, customization and presentation across multiple devices and apps, high-quality Caller Identification service is significantly more than just a name. It’s an enhanced experience business subscribers value and expect their CSP to provide.

With the increase in robocalls, call spoofing and fraud, more and more businesses are looking to display their business caller ids on mobile phones so customers know who’s calling and answer.

However, because accurate Caller ID hinges on efficiently managing names and numbers so calls can be trusted, the technology requires a close partnership between CSPs, industry experts like TransUnion and enterprises. To be successful, businesses must seek out reliable and reputable providers.

With TransUnion OneTru, the most extensive reach of authenticated calling name data, carriers have access to hundreds of millions of name and number combinations derived from the top carriers in the US. This provides a clear advantage to CSPs grappling with data accuracy, missing wireless data and data tampering.

Our best-in-class data, information services and analytics capabilities apply proprietary methodologies to aggregate, build, cleanse and manage data to clearly and efficiently display the caller’s identity.

As technology advances, so do our identity solutions to make it easier for CSPs to manage phone numbers and associated caller names (CNAM) and make them available to the entire call ecosystem of carriers and mobile app providers.

That enables enterprises to more successfully manage the accuracy and consistency of enterprise brand identity and business information displayed to consumers. And it’s paved the way for Branded Call Display, using rich call content.

How does branded call display work?

With Branded Call Display, we provide a single standards-based interface through which enterprises can sign outbound calls via STIR/SHAKEN call authentication, and deliver branded call display experiences across their carrier and technology partners — without the need to develop separate, proprietary and non-scalable interfaces.

Our call authentication solution signs the call with a STIR/SHAKEN PASSporT. Once the call is verified end to end, software on the called party’s mobile phone retrieves the rich call content for display.

How do you show your business name when calling?

Setting up business caller ID helps you improve your outbound calling results while protecting your customers and business. There are two components to Caller ID

Name: This is the name of your business. You’ll have up to 15 characters to work with, but to be safe, you might want to keep your message to even less than that to ensure clarity across different phone types
Number: Custom phone numbers help display your professional image

The process starts with verifying the legitimacy of your organization, business purpose, calling behavior and ownership of telephone numbers. Most businesses use a variety of numbers sourced from multiple service providers. You need to be seen as the legitimate call originator for all your numbers — across the entire call environment of voice carriers, call analytics programs, and mobile applications — or your calls may be wrongly blocked or tagged as spam.

To do so, you can work with a partner like TransUnion to:

Validate your business details, inventory of telephone numbers and caller data
Manage, monitor and update this information across the calling environment
Remediate any errors in identity for your numbers across the calling environment

That partner can also help you enable a more accurate call display. Business phone numbers often display inconsistent, inaccurate or even blank caller ID names due to variations across internal systems and processes.

It’s important that you:

Ensure the correct calling number is displayed
Verify which names are assigned to each telephone number
Measure the performance of caller names and adjust for greater answer rates

Finally, get your phone listed in the CNAM database. This verification process ensures your caller ID is accurate and verified, which in turn provides the display you desire. Call your service provider and ask them to troubleshoot the CNAM issues, potentially even having them file a CNAM inquiry on your behalf.

The process for displaying your business name on an iPhone and Android is the same; however, what can be displayed and whether calls are being verified with call authentication varies by service provider and branded calling partner.

How to set up business caller ID

Of course, while businesses are looking for the best branded caller ID solutions available, the process is a little more complicated than buying an off-the-shelf solution. It’s important to first determine your needs: Are your calls being mistagged as spam or blocked? Are you getting negative feedback from customers about their phone experiences? Are your calls not getting through?

We reviewed the basic steps of setting up business Caller ID, but if you’re wondering, “can I display business name or custom text as my Caller ID?”, the answer is yes. However, ensuring it’s done properly includes several steps.

Consider partnering with an expert like TransUnion to help you determine what your most pressing needs are and how to satisfy them.

Steps include:

Understand your baseline call patterns to identify telephone numbers (TNs) wrongly blocked or tagged.
Implement Caller Name Optimization (CNO), part of our Trusted Call Solutions suite, which helps prevent calls from being mistagged as spam or blocked.
Register TNs across the caller ID ecosystem.
Monitor changes to the reputation of your registered TNs.
Implement Branded Call Display (BCD) so your customers know and trust it’s really you calling and answer.

Learn more about getting the best branded calling solution you can find by reading our eBook: Increasing Right-Party Contacts With Branded Calling.

Learn more about TransUnion Branded Call Display here.

NOTE: TruContact™ Communications and Contact Center Solutions are powered by Neustar™, a TransUnion company.