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Eighty percent of people don't answer calls from numbers they don't recognise (Pew Research). For calls carrying a "Spam Likely" label, the answer rate drops into the single digits the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) puts it at roughly 9%. That single statistic reframes what a contact centre is actually selling. A white label contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform with the best routing and analytics in the world still fails the customer if the outbound call never gets picked up. Answer rate has quietly become a deliverability metric the voice equivalent of email inbox placement and number authentication is the lever that moves it.
BLUF: Unanswered calls used to be treated as a dialling or timing problem; the data now shows they are overwhelmingly a trust problem tied to caller identity.
Hiya's State of the Call research found that 46% of unidentified calls go unanswered, while 77% of consumers say they're more likely to pick up when they recognise who's calling. The same research flagged roughly 19–20 billion calls as suspected spam in a single half-year period, with flag rates exceeding 20% of unknown calls across most tracked markets. None of that is a dialling problem. It's an identity problem, and identity is something a contact centre platform can actually fix.
BLUF: Carriers score outbound numbers on identity and behaviour signals, but the regulatory response to fixing that identity gap varies significantly by market.
Carrier-side spam scoring looks at calling velocity, area-code matching, consistency of Caller Name (CNAM) data, and increasingly cryptographic caller ID authentication. Two regulatory approaches illustrate just how differently markets have chosen to address this.
The FCC requires voice service providers to implement the STIR/SHAKEN framework, which cryptographically signs and verifies caller identity on IP-based calls. Even providers that haven't fully implemented it must file a Robocall Mitigation Plan, and providers absent from the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database have had their traffic blocked by other carriers since 2021.
Ofcom examined a comparable cryptographic Calling Line Identification (CLI) authentication scheme for the UK and, in a 2024 assessment, decided not to mandate it concluding that authentication alone wouldn't sufficiently address calls spoofed from overseas, and that it would be complex and costly relative to alternative measures. Instead, Ofcom opted for a combination of blocking rules for spoofed international calls presenting UK numbers and an industry good-practice guide.
Strategic Insight: Because the "correct" regulatory answer differs so much by market, verifying number identity in software rather than betting on one national framework is what lets an operator guarantee answer-rate outcomes everywhere at once. Enreach's APIs support programmatic number and CLI management for exactly this kind of cross-market consistency.
BLUF: We haven't reduced the answer-rate impact of number verification to a single internal benchmark figure, and that's deliberate the improvement is real but too dependent on vertical and calling pattern to generalise responsibly.
Across the deployments we support, verified numbers consistently show a clear, visible uptick in answer rate compared to unverified ones. We don't publish a single global percentage for that lift internally, because the size of the effect moves with the calling vertical, the destination market, and the existing reputation of the number pool being used. What's consistent is the direction, not the magnitude which is itself a useful data point: this isn't a one-off campaign trick, it's a structural fix.
For an SP, this is the commercial pivot: number verification stops being a compliance checkbox and becomes a measurable service-level claim.
Auto-diagnostic: If your CCaaS proposal doesn't mention caller ID verification anywhere, ask whether your last outbound campaign underperformed for a reason nobody investigated.
| Dimension | United States (STIR/SHAKEN) | United Kingdom (Ofcom approach) |
|---|---|---|
| Core mechanism | Cryptographic signing and verification of caller identity | Blocking rules for spoofed international calls + good-practice guide |
| Mandatory for providers? | Yes, with database filing required regardless of implementation status | No formal authentication mandate as of the 2024 assessment |
| Enforcement lever | Traffic blocked if absent from the Robocall Mitigation Database | Enforcement programme targeting providers allowing spoofed calls |
| Underlying goal | Verifiable, signed caller identity end-to-end | Reduced harm from spoofed numbers, pragmatically scoped |
No. STIR/SHAKEN authenticates that a number wasn't spoofed, but spam-scoring engines also weigh calling volume, patterns, and consumer complaints, so authentication reduces risk without eliminating the need for good calling hygiene.
Only indirectly, but the underlying principle that unverified numbers get labeled and unanswered applies wherever carrier-side spam scoring exists, which is why the fix needs to be built into your platform rather than tied to one country's rules.
Ongoing. Number reputation can degrade over time due to calling patterns or complaints, so verification and monitoring need to be maintained continuously, not configured once and forgotten.
Yes, in the same way email deliverability became a sellable metric once inbox placement started varying by sender reputation once a metric is measurable and improvable, it stops being an assumption and becomes a line item.
Within days of verifying your outbound number pool, your CCaaS customers could see fewer "Spam Likely" labels and a measurably higher share of calls actually being picked up. Talk to the Enreach for Service Providers team.
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