New Product Launch: Smart CNAM API
In a world where communication is paramount, having accurate and meaningful caller information can make a huge difference. In a recent blog post, Three Issues with CNAM Data and How They Impact Businesses, we talked about the limitations with the current CNAM standard that carriers and businesses have come to rely on and the places it falls short around coverage, accuracy, and even response times.
To address these issues, we decided to launch Smart CNAM API with a specific focus of serving businesses that rely on this industry standard and have been frustrated with its limitations.
To recap quickly, CNAM (stands for Caller Name Delivery) is a technology that allows phone numbers to be linked to other alphanumeric data that displays on Caller ID systems. CNAM allows for the use of 15 alphanumeric characters, always uppercase, and no use of punctuation beyond spaces. In the U.S., phone carriers issuing telephone numbers to businesses have the ability to feed in CNAM details that link to each number. Phone carriers share CNAM details with a number of CNAM database providers. When calls are made, the decision is up to the terminating carrier to perform a CNAM lookup on the incoming number using the databases operated by the CNAM database providers. The carrier displays the CNAM information on the end-user’s Caller ID system when a call is coming in.
In business context, the caller identification use case is common within call centers, but we also saw CNAM data being used for identity verification. This can be for TCPA compliance reasons to confirm the right party contact, but the current CNAM limitations around coverage and accuracy limits its usefulness to businesses. We have also seen cases where a lot of junk or incorrect information is now flowing through carriers who do not have appropriate means to handle the CNAM change requests coming from the phone owners.
When we would talk to our customers, we saw these limitations firsthand and wanted to address them specifically by:
- Providing the best coverage and accuracy
- Implementing a simple, clean API, like the current CNAM, that is easy to integrate for businesses and carriers within their SS7 networks
- Adding additional insights that can help businesses receive more context about the caller
- Lowering response times that work for businesses in their mission-critical applications
We achieved these with our latest product, Smart CNAM API. Some of its features are in direct response to the objectives above.
- Our name coverage is 90% compared to 50% CNAM coverage.
- Our API response classifies the caller as a person or business.
- Businesses can depend on our authoritative data for their mission-critical applications and compliance requirements.
- Our API response times are as low as 50 milliseconds p99.
Integrating Smart CNAM API is an extremely straightforward process. Developers can access the documentation and can sign up for an API key. If you have any questions or want to learn more about Smart CNAM API and how it can help your business, feel free to contact us.