Vodafone Idea partners Truecaller to verify its customer service caller ID

Vodafone Idea on Thursday partnered with spam detection and blocking application Truecaller to verify its customer service and sales caller IDs.

“Amid the rising number of customer service frauds, it is imperative to ensure that the customer interactions are safe and secure through trusted and verified communication from customer-centric businesses,” the telco said in a statement.

As a part of this collaboration, Truecaller through its Verified Business Caller ID solution has enabled Vi’s customer service and sales team to deliver a secure and enhanced customer communication experience.

This will help Vi customers recognise authentic calls from Vi through indicators such as a green callerID, a tamper-proof brand name and logo, a verified business badge, a category tag, and a call reason.

“Our Verified Business solution has become integral to the industry’s effort to build a more secure and trusted communication environment. Our collaboration with Vi marks a significant step in this direction, helping one of the telecom industry’s giants to strengthen customer interactions and reinforce trust in its services,” said Priyam Bose, Global Head, GTM at Truecaller.

“We are happy to partner with Truecaller – one of the most trusted caller ID service providers, to offer more secure and verified communication to our customers. We continue to stay committed to deliver top-notch customer support experience, enhance calling efficiency, and deliver timely services to our users,” said Ashish Sharma, EVP – Customer Service, Vi.

As per Truecaller, so far, over 2000 active businesses across India and other prominent global markets have benefitted from its Verified Business Caller ID solution.

In June, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) asked all telcos to deploy detection systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies to identify and rein in spam calls and text messages from unregistered telemarketers (UTMs).

The telecom regulator wants telcos to use cutting-edge tech tools around AI/ML to counter UTMs, especially as the latter are constantly evolving new ways to bombard mobile users with pesky commercial calls and text messages.

“…UTMs are continuously evolving new techniques to send unsolicited commercial communications (UCC) and the current systems deployed by access service providers are not fully capable of detecting them…therefore, to have uniformity of detect system implementations, all access providers are directed to deploy AI and ML- based UCC detect systems capable of constantly evolving to deal with new signatures, new patterns and new techniques used by UTMs,” Trai has said in its direction to telcos.

TRAI also wants the telcos to use detection systems that enable information sharing with law enforcement agencies (LEAs), the home ministry and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). It has also called on operators to deploy spam call detection systems that can engage in sharing intelligence with other access providers using the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform.