In one of the previous articles last year we discussed about Local Presence calling (or local touch). The topic is very popular, and I would like to return to it one more time. This time maybe less technical details.
Local presence dialing is a method of assigning caller ID from the same region as where called persons number is. The calls from the same or close region are more likely to be picked up, since people may think that caller is somebody they might know personally. The technique is used by call centers where they use large pool of numbers and select one which is from same are as called party.
Here I would like to explain approach we use in our DTL SAARA software. The idea is following:
- If the caller e. g. call center or a company) has a Caller ID (a DID number) in the same area as the called party, we pick the number from that area. That is simple case;
- Now, if there is no DID matching the are of the called party, the process is more complex. We keep a map of all dial codes (NANPA codes) in the system, as displayed in top picture. System uses map to measure distance from the point on the map where called party numbers are code is to the point on the map where closest available DID number of the caller is located. this DID is then used as caller ID.
The above simple method is very fast if we use simplified approach to measuring the distance on the map, as we explained in the previous article dedicated to this subject.
Some may argue that geographic distance between points on the map does not always represent how "close" caller IDs are perceived by users. That is true, and for that reason we made the points on the map movable, i. e. operator can artificially make some caller IDs "closer" to each other by simply moving points on the map and save the new state.
The explained method is usable not only in North America with NANPA codes, but can be utilized in any other country or area where phone numbers are distributed geographically.
