July 9, 2025
How Call Attestation Ratings Might Impact Your Business
In the STIR/SHAKEN framework, Signature-Based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN) establishes call attestation ratings. A call’s rating will then determine how the system handles it and influence whether consumers choose to answer their phones.
The system provides a way for carriers and networks to improve reliability and transparency. Over time, consumers should see that the system protects them from bad actors. In turn, that should increase consumer trust, making it easier for legitimate organizations to reach the right people.
Unfortunately, call attestation ratings don’t always happen precisely as they should. When that happens, it could have negative repercussions on your business.
Below, you’ll learn more about how call attestation works, the impact call attestation ratings can have on your business, and how you can easily audit ratings to improve brand trust.
How Call Attestation Works
Call attestation starts when someone initiates a call. When you place a call, your originating service provider (OSP) receives a token that proves the phone number is associated with the correct user. The token then gets passed to a certificate authority (CA). If successful, the OSP receives a certificate that lets it sign calls digitally.
The process can create one of three call attestation levels:
- Full attestation (A) — At this attestation level, the primary service provider can say that it knows the customers and gave them the number. The primary service provider can also say that the call originated on its network. This is the highest level of proven trust.
- Partial attestation (B) — With partial attestation, the primary service provider can say that it knows the customer and the call came from its network. However, the primary service provider didn’t give this customer the phone number. This adds some uncertainty about whether the phone number truly belongs to the customer.
- Gateway attestation (C) — This is the lowest level of trust. At this level, the service provider says that the call didn’t originate from its network and it doesn’t have a relationship with the customer who initiated the call.
Every dialer should do what it can to reach an A call attestation level. Anything that falls short of that will likely get treated as a potential scam call.
Impact of Attestation Ratings
Using a network provider that can’t ensure high attestation ratings can damage your calling reputation. When your connections have low scores, expect calls to attract negative call labels, flagged numbers, and even blocked calls. Any of these repercussions can have a ripple effect that hurts your business.
Reduced Call Connections
Do you answer calls when your caller ID screen warns you that it might come from a scammer? Like most people, you probably let the call go to voicemail. You might even report it to your service provider or a third-party app.
That’s also how other consumers respond when they see warning labels. Not surprisingly, you can expect fewer call connections after your numbers get labelled, flagged, or blocked.
Lost Revenue
If you struggle to connect with consumers, your business will lose revenue that it expected to attract through its outreach campaign. Low call attestation ratings can indirectly slash your anticipated return on investment (ROI). At some point, you could even end up spending more money on the campaign than you generate from the calls.
One report shows that U.S. call centers lose $658 million per day to unanswered calls.
Reputation Damage
A few calls that get low-attestation scores probably won’t hurt your brand’s reputation much. Unfortunately, the problem will likely continue until you find a way to improve your call attestation ratings. If one call gets a B or C rating, there’s a good chance hundreds or thousands of other calls will get similar ratings. Eventually, service providers and third-party apps will learn that they shouldn’t trust your outbound numbers.
Increases Costs
Depending on how you respond to them, low attestation ratings could increase your call center’s costs. Let’s say you want to make X number of sales this week, but low attestation scores keep blocking your progress. If you don’t know that your calls have low scores that convince consumers they don’t want to answer, then you might pay more sales reps to reach the goal.
Resolving the issue that causes low ratings is the better option because it will save you time and money while helping reps connect with more leads.
Compliance Violations
Low call attestation ratings likely mean that your system is out of compliance. If left unchecked, compliance violations could lead to increasingly expensive fines from regulators like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Auditing With CIDR’s Attestation Tester
Caller ID Reputation’s Attestation Tester can identify the call attestation ratings of your calls, giving you the information needed to resolve issues before they harm your business. CIDR’s Attestation Tester makes it easy to spot problems. Then, you can take immediate steps to improve your rating and start reaching more of your leads.
Schedule a demo now to see how CIDR can work for you.
