Consumers pick up the phone when they have trusted information about the businesses calling them

• What’s the News: New solution helps service providers authenticate legitimate calls from businesses impacted by SHAKEN specification and the industry-wide crackdown on illegal robocalls.
• Why it Matters: Outbound calls from law-abiding enterprises and other organizations may be at risk of being treated as an unverified or unknown call, which could potentially result in lower answer rates.
• Who’s it For: Legitimate businesses who want to make sure that their outbound calls are properly verified, and the caller ID information is presented accurately to the recipient.

BRIDGEWATER, NJ – December 4, 2019 – Currently, over 75% of calls are left unanswered when the call comes from an unidentified or unfamiliar number. This is due to the spike in illegal robocalls, which reached 85 billion globally in 2018 – a 325% jump from 2017. The new ATIS-SIP Forum Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN) framework will help mitigate illegal robocalls so that consumers can once again trust the calling number displayed on their caller ID.

Since the SHAKEN framework attaches a digital signature to help consumers recognize authentic calls, law-abiding enterprises and other organizations may be at-risk of being caught in SHAKEN’s net by virtue of how they procure voice services.

To help avoid that from happening, service providers can now leverage authoritative data in iconectiv’s TruReach Intel software as a service (SaaS) solution to help fully authenticate legitimate calls from business customers. When deployed by a service provider, TruReach Intel will provide a verified association between the business and the caller ID being used when the originating service provider has not provided that telephone number to the business. This allows more calls to be fully authenticated and consequently more calls to be delivered, which is essential to getting these calls answered again and letting legitimate commercial callers get back to business. This also maximizes the reach, effectiveness and ROI of legitimate businesses’ omni-channel marketing initiatives and outbound customer service programs.

Many businesses, including call centers, have operations around the country, so they use multiple service providers. As a result, legitimate calls may appear with numbers unknown to the originating service provider and not receive an attestation of full authenticity depending on how the calls enter the network. TruReach Intel can help legitimate businesses get their calls answered by ensuring multi-homed business customers also have an opportunity to get calls attested as authentic—ultimately protecting their revenue by safeguarding the reputation of their customers. This can further enable the terminating network to augment the calling party info with confidence such as showing the authentic brand name or logo on the called party’s phone—allowing consumers to make a more informed decision about whether to answer the call.

“SHAKEN is a critical factor in the journey the industry is undertaking toward tackling the scourge of illegal robocalls, but it also risks inflicting collateral damage on millions of legitimate businesses,” said Richard Jacowleff, CEO, iconectiv. “TruReach Intel gives service providers a fast, authoritative way to vouch for those businesses and collaborate with their peers to exchange trusted information so consumers can make informed decisions about incoming calls. The more consumers can trust that they know the caller displayed on their device, the more calls they will answer.”

iconectiv is the nation’s Secure Telephone Identity Policy Administrator (STI-PA) for SHAKEN. For more information about SHAKEN, visit https://www.atis.org/sti-ga. To learn more about visit TruReach Intel, https://iconectiv.com/trunumber/intel.