BrandDelivery™ Fills the Caller Identity Gap
“If you don’t know who the call is from, don’t answer it.”
At this point in the era of rampant robo-calling we’ve probably all given this piece of advice to a friend or family member. I’ve given this advice to parents, in-laws, friends, kids, friends… and the advice does limit annoying or dangerous calls and scams. But I will admit there is a dark side to this advice… an unfortunate consequence. Those of us who have cut the cord and use only a cell phone for calls are definitely going to miss some calls we actually want to receive if we knew what they were. And if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of businesses and organizations in the US that are making those calls… calls consumers specifically asked you to make… you know first-hand the frustration of calling consumers that are following that advice.
We’re not talking about telemarketers trying to sell you stuff… car warranties, duct cleaning services… you know who they are. We’re talking about calls from your doctor or pharmacy, your kids school or your favorite charity that you give to regularly. If you’re wondering why all those places stopped calling you the answer is that they haven’t stopped; your phone company just started labeling them as spam or a telemarketer so you stopped answering them. After all… why would you ever pick up a call labeled “Spam” or “Telemarketer?”.
Sadly the telecom gods are not omniscient. They don’t really know if it’s a spam or telemarketer call (hence the posterior covering question mark they append to their best guess). So when you see the Spam? or Telemarketer? message, know that’s their way of saying that they have no idea who is calling. And even though they don’t know who the call is coming from they’ve been told by the Federal Communication Commission to warn you by categorizing the caller under one of several generic headings that essentially all boil down to a flashing sign warning you to think before you answer the call.
The Caller Identity Gap
In the last year or two a gap developed in our ability to identify ourselves to those we call. If an organization calls a landline or VoIP line, the majority of telephone companies that provide that service provide a caller ID for inbound calls. Right before your phone rings, the caller name is looked up by your phone company and sent to your phone. When someone calls a cell phone, that step doesn’t happen. If you have a smart phone, the phone application you use to actually talk on the phone looks up the incoming number in your list of contacts and displays the contact name. However, that doesn’t happen when a call comes in to a cell phone from a number that isn’t in the phone’s contact list. We call this missing piece the Caller Identity Gap.
Until recently if the calling number wasn’t already in your smart phone’s contact list your phone app would just display the number from which the call came. The Spam? and Telemarketing? tags were added recently by the large mobile phone brands in order to help protect consumers from all the spam and robo-calls, many of which are fraudulent at worst and annoying at best. As mentioned above, the mobile phone companies don’t really know if it’s a spam or telemarketer call, but they’ve developed some algorithms to help them predict if the call is presumed to be unknown but ok, or unknown and risky. The problem with these algorithms is they need data in order to make an accurate prediction and if they don’t have the right data they will often default to the assumption it’s a risky call. Those are the calls they label as spam.
BrandDelivery™ Fills the Gap
PacificEast’s solution to the Caller Identity Gap provides a tool for companies and organizations to finally fill that gap. Our solution, BrandDelivery™, provides a simple mechanism for organizations to send their caller information to a single place and have the data distributed to the major mobile phone companies as well as national caller registries so their calls are not only not labeled as spam, but even more importantly so the person being called can tell who is calling them.
Using BrandDelivery™ is simple. You simply send us the telephone numbers from which you are making calls and how you want those calls identified to the numbers you are calling. We take care of registration of your telephone numbers with the mobile phone companies and the national caller registries. From that point on, when you call a cell phone your brand or caller name will be displayed on the cell phone when you call.
For more information and pricing for our new BrandDelivery™ platform you can call us at 800-665-8400 or email us at BrandDelivery@PacificEast.com. Download our whitepaper below, for full details on the history and how BrandDelivery™ can provide solutions for your business.