Registered Caller Helps Maximize Call Answer Rates for Businesses

Proof-of-concept trial with Verizon and Metaswitch highlights Registered Caller’s ability to successfully authenticate legitimate enterprise calls and mitigate spam and robocalls

• What’s the News: A Registered Caller proof-of-concept trial with Verizon and Metaswitch successfully showed that valid enterprise calls were fully authenticated, shared and broadcasted for optimal call delivery to improve the call answer rate.
   
• Why it Matters: Spam and illegal robocalls have caused consumers to stop answering calls from telephone numbers they don’t recognize. This poses a significant challenge for legitimate businesses trying to reach consumers by telephone with important or timely updates and information. Service providers use STIR/SHAKEN’s digital signatures to confirm that the business making a call has the legitimate right to use that telephone number.  Integrating with Registered Caller gives service providers a simpler mechanism to assign the appropriate level of attestation and verification.
   
• Who’s it for: Service providers, contact centers and enterprises doing large volumes of outbound calling.  

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. – JAN. 25, 2022 – Consumers are inundated with robocalls: around 48 billion in 2020, according to the FCC. Of those, approximately 45% are illegal robocalls, which may help explain why 71% of consumers no longer answer their telephones. As part of the industry’s concerted effort to address this issue, the United States has implemented the STIR/SHAKEN framework to provide phone companies with a powerful new framework for weeding out illegal robocalls and other spam.

The ability to do that is simplified with Registered Caller, the industry’s centralized registry that independently verifies the association between the telephone number and the business using it. This is particularly important for companies, such as contact centers and market research firms that are legitimately using a telephone number on behalf of another company.  Registered Caller helps originating Service Providers better ensure these legitimate calls are not being blocked, flagged as spam or ignored by consumers.

To further validate its effectiveness, a Registered Caller trial with Verizon and Metaswitch successfully established enterprise calls being fully authenticated and shared with the recipient, which helped give consumers confidence when answering the call.

“Verizon is committed to ensuring that calls from our enterprise customers receive the highest level of attestation regardless of the terminating network, which is absolutely critical in the STIR/SHAKEN era,” says Lulia Barakat, Senior Manager, Verizon. “This proof-of-concept trial with Metaswitch demonstrated that the CTIA and iconectiv Registered Caller solution is easy to integrate, and that the caller ID for our enterprise customers was presented to the recipient with the appropriate level of attestation, regardless of the terminating network provider.”

Key Benefits of Registered Caller:

• Enterprises can receive A-level attestation for calls initiated by telephone numbers that are not owned by the originating service provider.
• Enterprises do not need to make any hardware or software changes.
• Originating service providers need only to connect to the registry to obtain the information they require.

Research shows that authenticated calling information is key to restoring consumer trust and increasing call-answer rates for legitimate businesses. In fact, 95% of consumers say they would answer a call if they knew it was from a trusted source. High call-answer rates also reduce operating expenses by minimizing phone tag, which requires additional time and resources for follow-up calls.

“Registered Caller holds great promise in helping restore consumer trust in voice calls,” said Peter Brown, Director of Product Management, Metaswitch. “Providing independently verified information about each telephone number and the business using it provides a clear signal for consumers that they should answer a call to their device.   This will help significantly reduce operational expenses for outbound calling and increase call answer rates.”

The full use case can be found here.