Are you concerned about whether your outgoing calls will be picked up? In a world of robocalls, spam and scams, everyone has gotten quite cautious in picking up the phone. Phone Carriers and device providers have been trying to combat this, and have gotten quite aggressive in labeling calls as spam. While this is great for the consumer, it’s become harder for legitimate callers such as school districts to reach out to their callers.
Ensuring that outgoing calls are displayed properly to users is a complex issue, as there is no guaranteed method to make sure your district name appears properly to users. However, there are a number of tools we use to drastically improve the chances your calls will be picked up.
Caller ID Name (CNAM)
When a phone carrier receives a call, before passing that call on to the recipient, they want to show who the call is coming from. They do this by finding out the Caller ID. There are two parts of “Caller ID”:
- The Number - traditionally called the “Caller ID”
- The Name - traditionally called the “Caller ID Name” or CNAM
If a receiving carrier does not have a CNAM, they simply display the phone number.
Making sure the receiving carrier has the CNAM is not exact, as each carrier has its own process for finding it. We have gone through the steps to register all of our phone numbers with the CNAM corresponding to the district the number belongs to. There are a few limitations to these CNAMs to be aware of:
- The CNAM needs to relate to the business the number is registered for. In our case it needs to correspond to the district name.
- The CNAM cannot be longer than 15 characters. This means in many cases we need to abbreviate the name in some way.
- The CNAM is managed per account. This means that each phone number in an account has the same CNAM.
Most importantly, we cannot guarantee that the CNAM is always shown. If you are not seeing a CNAM, here are a few reasons why that might be happening:
- The receiving carrier may not update the CNAM properly.
- Call recipients need to update their phone settings to receive CNAMs.
- The receiving carrier for some reason has decided to mark the call as “spam”.
Specifically for this last case, we have two more tools we use to deter calls from being marked as spam.
SHAKEN/STIR and Voice Integrity
Every phone carrier, and even some device providers, have their own processes to determine whether or not to mark a call as spam. This is an ever evolving battle as bad actors continue to find loopholes, and carriers continue to improve security. This means there is no guaranteed method to make sure that calls are never marked as spam. However, there are a few tools we can use to drastically reduce the likelihood of that occurring.
SHAKEN/STIR is a technology that targets caller ID spoofing by adding an authentication layer to the telephony network. SHAKEN/STIR comes out of two acronyms:
Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs
Secure Telephony Identity Revisited
Without getting into the technical details of how it works, this program essentially provides a grade for incoming calls that indicates how likely it is coming from the business it claims it is. By registering our phone numbers properly we are ensuring our calls are receiving an A grade. Carriers receiving phone calls will take this into account when decided when to mark calls as spam. On some smartphones recipients will even see “Caller Verified” on incoming calls.
Voice Integrity is a program specific to our service provider, Twilio, that registers phone numbers with different phone carriers. Carriers often have their own mix of analytics engines and number reputation checks to see if the call is legitimate. By using this program, we can be more confident that these carriers will know that our calls are not spam.