Distinctive Caller ID Name Overview

Distinctive Caller ID Name gives your team more context on an incoming call than a bare phone number. This page explains what the feature does and walks through a worked example.

What Distinctive Caller ID Name does

When a call comes in, Cloud Voice assembles a caller ID name that tells the employee both who is calling and how the call was routed to them. The result is a single string shown on the phone, built from the sources below. Cloud Voice checks each source in order and includes whichever names are available, from highest priority to lowest:

1. Contact name: the name saved for that number in the Company Contacts directory or the extension’s Personal Contacts directory.

   Note

   A Company Contacts name only appears if the extension user is allowed to view Company Contacts. If they lack that permission, the stored contact name is not shown on their phone.

2. Call feature name: the name of the IVR (Interactive Voice Response, the automated menu that answers and routes calls), Ring Group, Queue, or Call Flow the call passed through.

   Note

   When a call travels through more than one call feature before reaching the extension, only the last feature’s name is used. For example, if a call hits an IVR and is then sent to a queue, agents see the queue name.

3. Trunk DID/DDI name: the name you assigned to the phone number the caller dialed. DID (Direct Inward Dialing) is that specific inbound number; DDI (Direct Dialing In) is the same thing named outside North America.

4. Caller Name (CNAM): the caller’s name or company name delivered with the call.

   Note

   CNAM is set on the caller’s side, not within Cloud Voice.

If none of these names are available for a call, no caller ID name is displayed.

Example

Suppose your company runs a support team that handles customers in both China and America, and you want agents to instantly recognize which region a caller belongs to. You configure the following on your system:

Queue

A queue named Support for the support team.

SIP trunk

A SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunk with two DID numbers, each tied to its own name:

DID Number	DID Name
1258888	China
1256666	America

Tip

Give each DID a name that maps to a region, department, or campaign (like China and America here). Agents then see at a glance which number a caller dialed, without having to memorize the DID numbers themselves.

You also keep these two entries in the Company Contacts directory:

Name	Phone Number
Sunmy	5502222
Becky	5503333

When customers dial one of the DID numbers and land in the Support queue, agents see a caller ID name assembled in this order:

{contact_name}: {queue_name}: {trunk_did_name}: {caller_name}

Only the parts that have a value appear, so the display varies from call to call:

• Becky dials 1258888 to reach the support team and sends no Caller Name. Agents see Becky: Support: China.
• Sunmy dials 1256666 to reach the support team and sends no Caller Name. Agents see Sunmy: Support: America.
• An unknown customer dials 1258888 to reach the support team and their carrier sends the Caller Name Acme. Because the number is not in your contacts, agents see Support: China: Acme.