Truecaller will soon start making its caller identification service available over WhatsApp and other messaging apps to help users spot potential spam calls over the internet. The feature, currently in beta phase, will be rolled out globally later in May, Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi said.
Telemarketing and scamming calls have been on the rise in countries like India, where users get about 17 spam calls per month on average, according to a 2021 report by Truecaller.
Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi
India’s telecommunications regulator in February directed carriers like Jio and Airtel to start blocking telemarketing calls over their networks using artificial intelligence filters. Truecaller has said it is in discussions with telecoms operators to implement such a solution.
“Over the last two weeks, we have seen a spike in user reports from India about spam calls over WhatsApp,” Mamedi said, noting that telemarketers switching to internet calling was fairly new to the market.
WhatsApp is the most used messaging platform in India. The company says it uses spam detection technology to spot and take action on accounts engaging in abnormal behaviour and lets users block and report problematic accounts.
For Truecaller, India is its biggest market with 250 million users. It has 350 million users globally and earns its revenue from advertising, subscription services and verified listings from businesses.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Global caller identification platform Truecaller has announced a milestone of 500 customers for its Truecaller for Business offerings. This success has been achieved within a few months of conscientious efforts by the team in helping brands connect with their customers better. The businesses are from more than 25 countries, including Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, who have adopted the solution to add value to their existing businesses.
Truecaller
The offering allows businesses to verify their identities on Truecaller which increases consumer safety by preventing fraud and scam calls. This includes various types of businesses, across large public listed companies, digital natives, startups, e-commerce, education, healthcare, banking and financial services (BFSI) and more verticals.
With frauds and scams using spoofed identities on the rise across the world, there was a dire need to bring in more trust in communications. This is exactly why Verified Caller ID was introduced at the beginning of this year. After repeated user requests, Truecaller has announced another interesting feature to the Verified Business Caller ID solution: Call Reason. Call Reason enables Truecaller Verified Business customers to let their end customers know why they are calling them. It helps in adding context to business calls and improves customer confidence by communicating the reason for the call, even before the call is answered.
Truecaller has observed strong momentum from Banking and Financial Services to Edtech, to Digital Startups, and more. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa are focused emerging markets for the brand and are expected to scale further. Truecaller aims to accelerate its efforts to work closely with the enterprises to build communication efficiency with trust and safety.
Truecaller helps businesses in bringing more trust and efficiency in their communication with the users.
The Green Caller ID, Green Verified Badge, accurate name and logo and the new Purple Caller ID is for identifying priority calls. And now additionally, businesses can enable Call Reason too.
This feature will be available by default to close to 280 million Truecaller users globally – on both Android as well as iOS devices.
Truecaller for Business has business customers across key markets such as in the Middle East and Africa, the Americas and South-East Asia.
Commenting on the success, Priyam Bose Global Head, GTM, Truecaller for Business, said: “Our 500+ verified business solutions customers, spread across key markets globally, are on a journey with us to make business communication more trusted, safer, and efficient. Marquee brands/enterprises across traditional and digital first businesses are leveraging it to safeguard their brand reputation and bring efficiency to their day-to-day business communication with customers. Our latest offering, Call Reason, is a great value add to the otherwise context-less calls that were an increasing problem for consumers and businesses alike. Call Reason enables businesses to let their customers know precisely why they are calling them and augment customer confidence by communicating even before the call is answered.”
An official spokesperson for Swiggy, a prominent food delivery service in India and one of Truecaller’s early clients, had this to say: “Truecaller Verified Business Caller ID helps us reach out successfully to our customers and also helps us optimize our delivery attempts. This has helped us deliver on time. We are also one of the early access users of the Call Reason top-up feature of this solution and it has assisted in adding more context to our delivery calls and improving customer confidence by communicating even before our call is picked up.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Enables developers to instantly verify users on mobile web products.
Truecaller has announced the global launch of its Truecaller SDK solution exclusively for the mobile web platform. With this, Truecaller SDK now supports all the key mobile platforms across Android, iOS, React and now mobile web including Progressive Web App support. Developers can access the mWeb SDK from Truecaller’s global developer portal.
Across emerging markets like India and Africa, mobile web-based experiences on smartphones are proving to be the first point of discovery for users trying to access products and services online. One of the key challenges in these markets has been to on-board users using email or other modes and getting verified using the inefficient OTP process.
This SDK solution on the mobile web is intended to simplify this process for developers through its OTP-less and free to use phone number based verification solution, allowing their users to seamlessly and securely access services using their Truecaller credentials.
This ensures there are reduced barriers along with fewer user drop-offs and resulting in increased growth in verified users that contributes to minimized business risks for the developer.
Commenting on the launch, Priyam Bose, Global Head, Developer Platform & Relations, Truecaller, said: “Our vision has always been to enable the developer community by providing them with solutions that help them to build user-focused, trust-based and growth-oriented products.
User onboarding and verification continue to be one of the critical use cases for developers as it is crucial in creating the first impression for their users in terms of building a seamless and secure product experience. On an average, developers in growth markets are starting to see anywhere between 40%-60% of their users now coming from mobile web, giving us more reasons to launch our Truecaller SDK solution for mobile Web interfaces.”
This launch extends Truecaller’s philosophy of building and solving problems at scale for users and developers globally, with value-driven functionalities. Truecaller SDK service for the mobile web platform can be used to fulfill use cases such as mobile number based signup, login, checkout, verification, and more such touch-points across the user journey.
Early access developer partners for this service also shared their experiences.
Mukund Laddha, Product Manager, OYO, said: “At OYO, we have been expanding globally at a rapid pace. Improving user experience during authentication has been a key area of focus. This integration with Truecaller presented us with an opportunity to present users with a reliable alternate login method with a large presence across countries. This has made user on-boarding on the web more fluid and frictionless.”
Zairus Master, the CEO, Shine.com, said: “At Shine.com, our constant endeavor is to improve our end-user experience by adopting best-in-class technologies. As an early access partner, the integration with Truecaller’s verification solution for mobile web platform will help candidates simplify their registration process on Shine.com and facilitate a constantly active and verified set of candidates on the platform, complete with their updated contact details. We believe that this product integration will give Shine.com a competitive edge over other job portals which solely rely on traditional, OTP-based verification.”
According to Udit Tyagi, Product Head, Times Internet Limited – Indian Languages News Business: “In the ever-evolving world of PWA’s the gap between app and mWeb is slowly fading away and users expect uniformity and seamlessness in terms of experience and onboarding irrespective of the platform.
By leveraging Truecaller SDK for mobile web, we have been able to improve the on-boarding experience of users in our canvas of mobile web apps. In our case, onboarding conversions via Truecaller are 41% higher compared to standard onboarding processes.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.
