Chad Reynolds

William (and everyone else) - I reached out to Twilio support about this and can share what I learned.

TLDR: Zendesk can write in to Twilio to ask for your Caller ID (CNAM) to be set to your company name (the owner of the phone # has to make this request). I asked Zendesk to do this an they submitted the request for me. The CNAM update was made but no one is able to say how long it takes to populate the databases so I'm not sure how long to wait to test it (plus it sounds like it's not foolproof...some customers may still not see the caller ID as you wan tit). Below is the longer explanation from Twilio.

 

FROM TWILIO --

Regarding what you want here, CNAM, the big caveat here is that we don’t control how the callee’s carrier looks up CNAM. Nowadays we can request CNAM updates for Twilio phone numbers from the United States, but it is not possible for us to guarantee it will display correctly every time for everyone. CNAM isn’t something we send, unlike a CallerID, it’s something that the callee’s carrier looks up from a database when a call comes in. If they hit a database that’s not up to date, it can display wrong, or if they don’t hit it at all, it won’t display

Caller ID query/return is generally the responsibility of the terminating carrier. While many terminating carriers query the database we use for Caller ID, some query other databases and some require their subscribers to purchase enhanced services for Caller ID return.

I just want to set your expectations here. We consider this a best-effort scenario where we can request our provider update the CNAM for a Twilio phone number, however, as mentioned we are unable to guarantee it's delivery to a destination simply due to us not having control over how the destination carrier queries a number.

However, we will need the Twilio project owner to write in the request to us. Please ask Zendesk reach out to us with providing the phone number and the name you would like to update. CNAM is limited to 15 characters because of an industry standard.

 

This is a huge issue for us as well. We need our calls to customers to show our Caller ID -- business name not phone number. Otherwise we just look like one of the many phone spammers out there and our customers don't answer because they don't know it's us. This feature would have such a massive positive impact on all your customers' businesses, Zendesk!

I see that Zendesk has closed some threads asking for this even though the only thing that was solved was to show phone number caller ID, not business name

This is a huge issue for us as well. We need our phone number to show our Caller ID -- business name not phone number. Otherwise we just look like one of the many phone spammers out there and our customers don't answer because they don't know it's us. This feature would have such a massive positive impact on all your customers' businesses, Zendesk!

I see that Zendesk has closed some threads asking for this even though the only thing that was solved was to show phone number caller ID, not business name