In this era of STIR/SHAKEN, your company’s caller ID means more than ever before. This caller information is the key to whether the call recipient answers the phone, rejects the call, or blocks the number. Your ID needs to inspire confidence and trust in order to make consumer connections. Fortunately, you do not have to leave this issue to chance. You can take steps to ensure that you present a trusted caller ID during your outbound calling campaigns.

You may not think much about your caller ID’s impact until you notice your answer rates plummeting. An unknown, spam, or scam ID will turn off consumers who have little trust in telemarketing campaigns. It is essential to be aware of your caller ID’s health before you’ve lost potential buyers. When you know what your ID says, you can immediately work to correct the problems that have led to a negative caller ID.

If your caller ID has a good reputation, you can relax and focus on other aspects of your calling campaign, such as agent education. In fact, many carriers now also show a mark next to “verified” or “trusted” caller IDs, which allows consumers to have more confidence in answering their phones and leads to a higher call conversion rate.

The health of your caller ID has a powerful impact. Consumer leads and prospects depend on these IDs to determine which calls they answer. Creating a positive caller ID is essential to your company’s success, so you need to understand exactly what makes up a trusted caller ID.

A trusted caller ID carries accurate information and conveys good phone number health. Creating one requires effort on the part of your business and the solutions and service providers you use to originate your calls.

Businesses should register their numbers on a CNAM database with carriers. This move ties your numbers to your company and allows your caller ID to display. It’s the first essential step in creating a trusted caller ID.

The voice service provider you use is crucial to your caller ID. Since the rollout of STIR/SHAKEN, attestation ratings can determine whether your calls connect. Your goal is to achieve full attestation (Attestation A) because that demonstrates your call’s origin has been verified as legitimate.

Businesses can take a proactive approach by engaging in data hygiene practices. To stay “clean,” be certain you are scrubbing your dialing lists against the DNC and any internal opt-out list you may have. Violating a caller’s wishes will adversely affect your caller ID information. This could lead to consumers flagging your phone numbers.

Analytics engines actively monitor calls for suspicious activity. As such, your dialing habits could result in flags or outright blocked calls. Dialing too heavily, dialing a honeypot number (one that is setup to receive unsolicited calls), or breaking compliance regulations can ruin your caller ID.

In addition, individual consumers can flag your calls. If your agents engage in practices that annoy consumers, your phone number health could suffer.

Vigilance is critical in maintaining a trusted caller ID. You must actively monitor your phone numbers’ reputation. For instance, check your calls’ attestation ratings to ensure you remain in the A-Attestation range. Early identification of issues in these areas can help you maintain a trusted caller ID.

While STIR/SHAKEN regulations, call labeling, and call blocking efforts are meant to improve the dialing ecosystem, mistakes do occur. Carriers and consumers both can flag legitimate numbers. When these mistakes occur, you need to act quickly and complete the following steps: identify, remediate, and redress.

In most cases, a call is flagged due to your company’s dialing habits. First, you need to learn whether your call was flagged by consumers or analytics engines.

When analytics engines block a call, they return a SIP header with a call blocking notification. This header can help you determine why your call was blocked.

Addressing consumer reports may be more difficult. You can get some insight by checking where the flags originated. Additionally, the numbers that receive flags in your campaign can help you understand what went wrong.

Generally, consumer flags indicate you used bad dialing lists, had poor agent interactions, or dialed an unwanted lead. Of course, some flags are simply erroneous. The system is far from perfect.

Once you have identified the source of your flags, you must work to remediate the problems. For instance, you may be over-dialing from one number. You can simply take that number out of rotation until it cools off. If you have failed to properly scrub a list, you can quickly fix that issue.

Taking fast action ensures you won’t receive another flag on the number. It also indicates to carriers and analytics engines that you are willing to address the behavior that created the flag.

Once you have taken steps to prove you have the best intentions, submit a redress request to the parties involved, including the FTC and individual carriers. Often, you can complete this process by using online communication.

A proper redress request can show carriers and analytics engines that your company engages in ethical dialing practices. By doing so, you can help improve the reputation of your phone numbers if they have received flags or labels.

You can be running a completely professional and legitimate phone campaign and still run into problems with your caller ID. Most businesses are not responsible for robocalls, but consumers are still wary after years of being tormented by unwanted contacts. Even the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN has not completely cured the problems with calling campaigns.

However, your company can do its part by ensuring you are using the utmost care when dialing consumers. You can practice good call hygiene, monitor your attestation ratings, and follow ethical dialing practices.

While carriers are mandated to monitor calls and provide accurate caller ID information, businesses also need to do their part. Maintain good dialing habits to instill confidence in consumers again and earn a trusted caller ID.