Announcing Caller ID Name Lookup

Announcing Caller ID Name Lookup

As we all know, first impressions are everything.  That’s why having accurate information about who’s on the other end of a phone call or message exchange is so important.

Today, we’re excited to announce an enhancement to Twilio Lookup that gives you even more phone number insight, with Caller ID Name (CNAM). Now you can programmatically lookup information about the registered owner of a US local phone number at any time.

The Caller ID Name was designed as an identifier for inbound landline calls. It’s typically displayed alongside the phone number on the receiving handset. Many phone numbers in the US register with a central CNAM database. This database contains identity information for the person or organization associated with each phone number.  It tells you if the number belongs to a business or a consumer and it provides the 15-character Caller ID Name for that number.

Until now, CNAM information was only available from Twilio when receiving a call. Very useful when you want to know who’s calling you. Not so useful when you need to place a call or send a message and don’t know who’s on the other end of the phone number you’re dialing.

Lookup is a great home for this functionality because it becomes programmatic and available for developers to use through an API.  For instance, if you’re building calling or texting into your app and want to include a directory listing that populates caller information as someone dials. Or you have a sales organization that calls and sends messages on new leads and want you CRM to automatically populate missing information or correct inaccurate entries.

How It Works

CNAM Lookup is part of Twilio’s Lookups API. It returns the caller name (CallerName), the caller type (CallerType), and any relevant error codes associated with the request (ErrorCode).

Here’s a simple example of finding caller information for an E.164 formatted number.

HTTP Response Output:

Pricing

Whether you use CNAM as a part of the Lookup API or the IncomingPhoneNumber instance resource, pricing is the same. CNAM has simple pay-as-you-go pricing of $0.01 per lookup.
If you’re ready to get started, check out our Lookup API docs. Otherwise, head to our website for more information and to see a demo of Lookup in action.