Neustar, Inc., a global information services and technology company and leader in identity resolution, is offering its Caller Name Optimization (CNO) Emergency Call Registry solution, free of charge, to hospitals, health care providers, state and local health officials, and other government officials to ensure emergency COVID-19 calls reach the public and are not blocked or mislabeled as spam. Emergency service providers that rely on the phone channel to deliver vital health and safety information related to COVID-19 can reach out to Neustar at EmergencyServices@team.neustar to confirm qualification and proceed with service implementation.
Health care providers as well as local, state and federal government sectors are reaching out to the public with phone calls to communicate critical COVID-19 information, but the calls are often being incorrectly tagged as spam, resulting in ignored calls and missed information. As a public service, Neustar is offering its CNO Emergency Call Registry solution, which vets the emergency service provider, confirms its phone number ownership across all major carriers, manages how the entity’s name appears on recipient device screens, and registers the entity’s number to mitigate incorrect call blocking and mislabeling. This public service application leverages Neustar’s commercial CNO caller name registration clearinghouse service — currently deployed for many of the largest enterprises across finance, health care, insurance and retail industries — as a centralized platform to register with leading mobile apps and more than 800 mobile, cable, VoIP and landline carriers.
“These are extraordinary circumstances, and we need to ensure our essential organizations can communicate effectively throughout this crisis,” said James Garvert, senior vice president and general manager of Caller Identification Solutions at Neustar. “One way Neustar can help is to ensure critical health calls are getting through. Our aim is to swiftly correct the inadvertent spam mislabeling and call blocking that is catching legitimate emergency and COVID-19 related calls in the same net as scammers and spoofed robocallers, and to do so for any organization that needs it, at no expense.”
To date, Neustar has implemented the free CNO Emergency Call Registry service across major mobile carriers for the Township of Millburn New Jersey and has worked with leading emergency communications platforms to complete several emergency service provider registrations across Alabama, Arizona, Kansas and Pennsylvania. For the affected organizations, Neustar remedied the call mislabeling within 24 hours of service implementation.
CNO is widely used and readily available to all enterprises, but this no-charge CNO Emergency Call Registry offering is expressly for emergency service providers for the sole purpose of making COVID-19 emergency calls.
To qualify, organizations must meet both criteria outlined by the FCC in Section 7 of its COVID-19 TCPA Declaratory Ruling. “First, the caller must be from a hospital, or be a health care provider, state or local health official, or other government official as well as a person under the express direction of such an organization and acting on its behalf. Second, the content of the call must be solely informational, made necessary because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and directly related to the imminent health or safety risk arising out of the COVID-19 outbreak.”
About Neustar
Neustar is an information services and technology company and a leader in identity resolution providing the data and technology that enables trusted connections between companies and people at the moments that matter most. Neustar offers industry-leading solutions in Marketing, Risk, Communications, Security and Registry that responsibly connect data on people, devices and locations, continuously corroborated through billions of transactions. Neustar serves more than 8,000 clients worldwide, including 60 of the Fortune 100.
