The short answer is yes, you should use a calling line ID. This is the technology that allows you to see what phone number a customer is calling you from, and it’s also what allows you to choose what phone number people see when you call them.
Customer call-answer rates are notoriously low—usually around 2-10 percent, depending on what study you’re looking at. At the same time, however, answer rates for local numbers are much higher—as much as four times higher in some cases—so it just makes sense to use a calling line ID that gives your calls a local appearance. That’s if you want a better chance of success with cold calling, of course.
But the benefits of a calling line ID go much further than that, as they can also help you keep your customers happy and increase the efficiency of your customer service and sales departments.
Inbound vs. Outbound: Why You Need a Calling Line ID for Your Business
Inbound Calling Line ID
Most people think about the benefits of calling line IDs in terms of outbound calls, but they’re actually very useful for inbound calls as well. This is because a calling line ID doesn’t just let you decide what phone number a customer sees, it also gives you information about the customers who call you. This lends itself to a number of helpful byproducts, from call screening and routing features to improving your customer service.
Screening
The more time your agents spend taking calls from unqualified leads or spam numbers, the less time they spend talking to the people you actually want them to be talking to. Calling line ID can help solve this problem by automatically screening calls as they come into your office phone system. This way, you can keep a database of blocked numbers that you won’t even bother taking calls from, and you can simultaneously keep an eye out for your hottest leads or most important customers.
Depending on the system, you can also require customers to say their name or answer a few questions before the call goes through to an agent, which helps to filter out undesirable callers and improves the efficiency of call routing.
Data and Statistics
Setting up an inbound calling line ID provides you with an easy way of tracking a caller’s history of interactions with your business. This helps you identify problematic customers and other leads that are more likely to be tire-kickers than actual buyers.
It also helps you maintain higher quality standards for your calls. For instance, if you find that a certain percentage of your customer calls are going unanswered or that multiple customers are having to call in over and over again, you’ll know that you need to see what’s going on with your agents.
Call Routing
One of the most useful elements of inbound calling line ID is the addition of call routing. Instead of callers going to whichever agent picks up the phone first (as was the case with most traditional landline systems), you can screen for customers associated with certain products or those located in certain geographic areas and route them to an agent who is likely to help them the best. Plus, if you combine this with a well-set-up Interactive Voice Response system, you can even have customers route themselves to the right place, saving everyone time while also increasing the chances of everybody walking away from the call happy.
Personalized Customer Experience
A good calling line ID system will automatically match a phone number with the associated customer profile in your Customer Relationships Management (CRM) system, letting your agent instantly pull up relevant data about that customer. This is invaluable both for sales calls and for customer service calls since it gives context and history to the agent taking the call. To really knock this out of the park, you can use a VoIP calling system that allows for calling line ID/CRM integration—along with other features like virtual phone systems, which lets your agents take calls from anywhere.
Customer Segmentation
Finally, you can use inbound calling line ID to segment customers based on a variety of data points, such as their geographic location or the number of times they’ve called in before. This allows you to determine which department they will need to talk to the most, which product is going to be the best fit for them, or where they can find their nearest customer service center—just to name a few case uses.
You can even segment customers based on specific marketing campaigns. For instance, if you’re running a special promotion for local callers, you could flag all incoming local calls to let your agents know which callers qualify for the deal or discount.
Outbound Calling Line ID
Due to all the spam these days, outbound calling line ID can be critical for getting decent call-answer rates. This is especially true for outbound call centers because it can help customers know who’s calling and encourage them to trust you enough to take the call.
Loyalty and Trust
People are far more likely to answer calls from businesses they know or businesses they think they might know based on their geographic area. Setting your outbound calling line ID to show numbers local to the person you’re calling can significantly boost your chances of them picking up. Depending on the system you’re using, you can also set up your caller ID to show that you’ve verified your identity. This way, people can feel comfortable picking up the phone because they know it’s actually you calling.
Similarly, using a calling line ID can help increase customer loyalty, as it allows you to reinforce your reputation as a trustworthy business. If customers always know what they’re getting when you call them, they’ll feel a much greater sense of familiarity in working with you.
Additionally, having your name and number clearly displayed makes it much easier for people to call you back in the case of disconnections. This is a much better alternative (for your business) than going online to search for a new vendor with a more easily accessible phone number.
Cost Effective
Using call center software that allows for an outbound calling line ID can also help you increase efficiency and decrease costs. It’s a simple and cost-effective thing to set up, and it requires virtually no ongoing maintenance. It also increases callback rates, which saves you time and money because you’re not having to chase down customers as much. Depending on how you set up your call routine, it can even help increase your First Call Resolution (FCR) among your callbacks.
For instance, if you use different phone numbers for each department, customers calling back will be more likely to call the number displayed on the outbound caller ID instead of your general customer service line. This helps get people to the right place faster, which means that your agents can operate at peak efficiency, saving both time and money.
Calling Line ID Compliance: What You Need to Know
While calling line ID is a powerful tool, it comes with a couple of regulations that are important to understand before using it.
This is mostly because of an unethical practice known as calling line ID spoofing—in which hackers will use a fake calling line ID to make themselves look like they’re part of a business that they aren’t in order to defraud people and trick them into answering calls. In response, the US Congress and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a number of regulations, including the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 and the STIR/SHAKEN framework.
Truth in Caller ID Act
The Truth in Caller ID Act makes it illegal to show false caller ID information with the intent of scamming or defrauding someone. While it’s completely legal to show different phone numbers to different customers—for instance, in the case of a virtual phone number—you cannot use software to make it look like you’re someone you’re not. When scammers do this, they tend to impersonate government agencies like the IRS or financial institutions like consumer banks.
At the end of the day, as long as you’re not setting out to trick your customers with your calling line ID, you should be fine using one.
STIR/SHAKEN
Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) and Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN) make up a framework of industry standards built to help make sure the people who use calling line IDs are exactly who they say they are.
In order to work, phone calls that are made via multiple numbers need to have their caller ID verified by the originating carrier. Thus, if you have a virtual phone number that you’re using to reach people in a certain geographic area, your phone carrier would know that this particular number is associated with whatever your actual number is. Only then will your call proceed with your caller ID number rather than being marked as potential spam.
In short, the idea behind these regulations is to give customers the ability to make informed choices as to whether or not they should answer a phone call, and therefore, the information about who you are must be easy to access and readily available. Furthermore, customers must also have the option to prevent you from being able to see their information on inbound calls to protect their own privacy.
While it’s usually pretty easy to stay compliant with calling line ID regulations, there are a few times when you might want to consider avoiding it. For example, if you collect sensitive information from your customers or you need to ensure their anonymity for things like anonymous surveys, you probably shouldn’t use an inbound calling line ID.
Similarly, if you’re dealing with very sensitive negotiations or you don’t want the public to know a specific number, you may also want to avoid using a calling line ID.
Finally, keep in mind that different regions have different rules when it comes to calling line IDs—and for call centers in particular—so it’s important to look up your local and federal regulations so that you can avoid putting your business at any potential risk.