Why is number masking important & is it illegal to mask a phone number?

In today’s fast-paced world, businesses need to be always available and accessible to their customers. A business needs to have a robust communication strategy while maintaining data privacy and security norms to make this happen. Data privacy is the need of the hour, and businesses taking it into account stand to gain a significant competitive advantage.

With hundreds of interactions between the customer-facing agents and customers every day, customers end up sharing a lot of sensitive personal information with the agents, the most important one being the phone number. In the wrong hands, a customer’s phone number can be misused and affect the business adversely in many ways. Businesses can use a cloud telephony-based service called phone number masking to avoid this. What is phone number masking?

Phone number masking is an innovative technique for data protection intended to safeguard the privacy of customer-facing agents as well as customers by hiding their phone numbers without affecting the call. With phone number masking, a seamless connection can be established between the customer and the business agent without either one’s phone number being displayed or shared. This type of cloud telephony service is revolutionising customer interactions by helping businesses uphold high standards of trust and privacy.

Why is phone number masking important?

With a phone number masking solution you can anonymise communication without compromising the connection or the interaction. The customer can reach the agent, or the agent can reach the customer without dialling their actual phone numbers, using a proxy phone number instead of on their phone network itself. The technology uses a cloud-based API proxy service, which routes the call to a cloud platform while hiding actual phone numbers.

When you get a number masking service, you can:

• Enhance long-term loyalty among customers.
• Improve the privacy and data security in customer interactions.
• Improve the customer experience by becoming more reliable and trustworthy.
• Track and monitor call for quality assurance and data analytics.
• Build customised unified communications.
• Reduce the possibility of revenue leakage.
• Meet the necessary security compliances.
• Improve overall ROI.

When you buy a number masking service, you can make outgoing calls as well as receive incoming calls over your regular phone network without a hitch while keeping both the phone numbers masked. Both the person’s caller IDs would display a phone number different from the actual phone number. The service can also be integrated with your Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Therefore, a number masking solution is essential for businesses desiring to offer top-notch secure customer service to their customers.

Is it illegal to mask phone numbers?

While number masking is a very useful technique to protect customer privacy, scammers have misused this technique abundantly, often raising ethical questions over the use of the technique. However, phone number masking solutions continue to be legal in most countries of the world, unless done to defraud or cause harm to anybody.

For instance, the FCC Website and Truth in Caller ID Act of the United States of America prohibits the transmission of wrongful information on caller ID to defraud, harm, or wrongly obtain anything of value. Unless there is an intent to harm, you can use phone number masking solutions.

The situation is similar in other countries like Canada, India, etc. However, in the United Kingdom, direct marketing companies must display their phone numbers, and violations can lead to fines of up to 2 million pounds.

Hence, you would need to check the local rules and regulations in the country you wish to operate in or whichever jurisdiction you fall under to determine the legality of phone number masking solutions.

Knowlarity’s Phone Number Masking Service

From cloud telephony services to artificial intelligence-powered speech analytics services as well as video communication platforms, Knowlarity is one of the most innovative companies in the cloud communications space. With over 6,000 happy customers, Knowlarity has a global footprint extending to over 65 countries and has bagged over 75 awards for its outstanding services and solutions covering over 25 different business verticals.

To know more about our phone number masking service call us at 1800-1020-340.