What Are the Best Use Cases for Branded Caller ID

Branded Caller ID (sometimes called Branded Calling) can be an excellent tool to improve your outbound answer rates and reduce the number of calls it takes to reach a prospect or customer. 

Branded Caller ID enables companies to display their brand name on their customers’ smart phones when making outbound calls – so customers know exactly who’s calling. If you’re struggling with showing up as ‘Spam Likely’, low answer rates or playing phone tag with customers, Branded Caller ID could be the right solution for you. 

When leveraged for the right use cases, we’ve seen Branded Caller ID lead to 10-40% increases in answer rates across AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and other carriers, and require many fewer call attempts to reach a customer. But it’s not effective for every brand and use case. Like any tool in your outbound playbook, you need to know when to use it and when not to. 

Best Use Cases for Branded Caller ID

The best use cases for using Branded Caller ID are those where the prospect or customer has recently engaged with your brand (warm outreach) and where the value of getting the call answered faster or with fewer attempts outweighs the cost of branding.

1. Outbound Sales Calls to Hot Leads – A prospect just visited your website, submitted their lead information, but abandoned midway through the purchase path. That’s the perfect moment to reach out with a timely, branded call. 70% of prospects were likely browsing on their mobile phone anyway, so when they see your brand show up, it feels like one continuous, personalized experience. Calling faster (“speed to lead”) alone is not enough, as many people will still screen calls when they don’t recognize the number.

2. Outbound Healthcare Calls – All outbound calls in the healthcare industry are good candidates for Branded Caller ID, whether that’s a membership enrollment case, an appointment scheduling case or even a provider calling a patient to share test results. Imagine you’re sitting in a meeting at work, and you see a call on your cell from a random 10-digit number. You’re probably going to silence it. But if after, you listen to the voicemail, and find out it was a doctor calling from a hospital to share your post-operation results from a recent surgery, think about how frustrated you are. If only the call was branded as “Mount Sinai Hospital” you would have known exactly what it was about, politely stepped out of the meeting, and taken the call. In healthcare, Branded Caller ID brings the double benefit of a better patient experience – with less anxiety or delay to medical treatment – and reduces the amount of time eaten up from doctors, nurses and other expensive medical professionals playing phone tag with patients. Hospital administrators will attest that without Branded Caller ID, it can take on average 5-10 calls back and forth to finally connect with a patient. 

3. Customer Support Callbacks – Branded Caller ID is more prominently used by outbound teams, but about 20-30% of inbound customer support calls lead to outbound callbacks or follow ups. This can be because of long wait times or after hours calls that require your agents to call the customer back. Or because the customer’s issue cannot be resolved on their first inbound call, and it requires your team to call them later with follow up information. This is a perfect use case for Branded Caller ID because the customer is expecting your call and they recognize your brand. Getting the outbound call answered on the first attempt brings down your cost to serve and time to resolution, both critical metrics for inbound call centers.

4. Emergency or Security Calls – Companies that offer roadside assistance, home security, emergency response or other types of time-sensitive dispatch services would be remiss to not use Branded Caller ID for their outbound calls. This story of a hiker who got lost on Colorado's Mount Elbert, but ignored phone calls from rescuers because they came from unknown numbers is an extreme example that demonstrates how, in critical situations like these, it’s imperative customers know who is calling. 

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When Not to Use Branded Caller ID

Branded Caller ID is not right for every use case. Here are 3 examples we’ve found where branded calls underperform unbranded calls.

1. Cold Calls – If you’re scraping leads from the phone book or some other directory, and the prospect didn’t engage directly with your brand beforehand (e.g., cold outreach), it’s unlikely branding will improve your answer rates and it may actually lower them. (Only if you have an incredibly well-known and respected brand might this work. But even then the customer may screen the call because it’s so out of the blue.)

2. Calls to Very Stale Leads – Branded Caller ID is also unlikely to work if you’re trying to re-engage leads who expressed interest in your product or service months or years ago, but never converted. Branding works best when your brand is top of mind and the prospect is still in-market for your offering.

3. Collections Calls – Typically by the time you’re making a collections call, a customer has stopped responding to more subtle nudges to pay their bills. Therefore, announcing your brand on a collections call is unlikely to generate a pick up. 

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Gray Areas for Branded Caller ID

There are a couple of use cases where it’s not obvious whether Branded Caller ID will work, and you really have to test it out to learn for your particular situation.

1. Calls to Leads from 3rd Party Marketplaces – If you’re acquiring leads via a marketplace or comparison site like Bankrate, Policygenius, Angi, or Guild Education for example – Branded Caller ID may or may not be effective. If you have a well-known brand or your brand was presented prominently on that site, then Branded Caller ID can increase answer rates. If not, sometimes it may be more effective to add some functional labels to your display name. For example, if someone was searching for an Injury attorney who was sent a lead from a 3rd party Legal site then instead of branding with e.g., “Chaffin Luhana” (the name of the firm), perhaps try using “Chaffin Injury Attorney.” (Of course you need to stay close to your DBA, otherwise your branding won’t get approved by the carriers.) 

2. Churned Customer Winback Campaigns – Reaching out to win back a customer who canceled your product or service is a common use case for outbound calling. Using Branded Caller ID on those calls may or may not work to your advantage. If a customer canceled their recurring Lawn Service for example because they moved to an area you didn’t cover at the time that’s a circumstance that can change over time, so if you’ve recently expanded your coverage and want to call that customer to win them back, branding that call can still be effective (since the customer didn’t have a negative experience with your brand). If, however, the customer canceled because of repeat bad service experiences, then branding the call could lead to the opposite results. It’s better to segment your winback campaign by cancellation reason and determine for each, whether to brand or not. If you’re placing a high enough volume of calls, A/B testing is the best option.

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Learn More about Branded Caller ID

Regal.io empowers businesses to go beyond standard caller identification, providing a unique avenue for brand enhancement and customer engagement. Visit Regal.ai’s products to learn how to start your journey to redefining caller identification, or read more about Branded Caller ID in What’s the difference between Caller ID, CNAM, and Branded Caller ID? and Meet Regal Call Branding^TM

Regal Call Branding^TM is just one of many products Regal offers in the realm of telecommunication to improve your outbound answer rates and revenue. To see Regal in action, Request a Demo.

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