Integrating Call Verification with your contact center

Elijah Robertson

Call Verification is a Bandwidth Maestro™ solution that helps you protect your contact center, customers, and agents from fraud costs. In this article, we’ll show you how to integrate it into your contact center as part of the Automated Caller Authentication feature. Bandwidth will deliver this service through APIs and SIP delivery.

You may want to gather fraud and spoof scores for each customer who calls your contact center. Using automation through spoof scoring can help you provide a seamless user experience for verified callers while creating friction for unidentified ones.

Getting started

To configure Call Verification for your identified toll-free origination numbers, you need:

  1. A registered Bandwidth account. If you already have one, please log in via the Bandwidth App.
  2. A toll-free phone number purchased from or ported to Bandwidth. Please note that Call Forwarding is not an option at this time.
  3. Call Verification API documentation. The accountID and activeCallId parameters are required to build an API request to the Call Verification server. The API request must be formatted as follows: 

https://call-verification.bandwidth.com/api/v1/accounts/{accountId}/activeCalls/{activeCallId}

How it works

The following x-header information is used to establish a connection with the BAND carrier metadata. This data will help with customer identification when establishing fraud and spoof scores per call:  

  • The SIP INVITE is delivered to the CCaaS instance, including the header x-Customer-Ixn, which provides a globally unique call ID to retrieve the scores.
  • The Bandwidth API is used to retrieve fraud and spoof scores associated with the call, using the X-Customer-Ixn value as the activeCallID parameter to identify the call.

Retrieving fraud and spoof calls on the active Bandwidth network

Active calls 

You can use an API endpoint to retrieve the risk scores for a specific phone call currently active on the Bandwidth network. We also offer another version of this endpoint for contact centers that don’t support the x-header.

The fraud and spoofing scores returned by this endpoint indicate the likelihood of a given phone call being fraudulent or coming from a spoofed phone number. Currently, this endpoint only supports inbound toll-free phone calls to Toll-Free Origination (TFO) numbers that have the call verification feature enabled. Other call types may be supported in the future.

Note: This information is generated after a call is answered and is cached for only 30 minutes. If you attempt to query it before the score has been generated or after the 30-minute cache period expires, the API may return an HTTP 404. Please see our API documentation for the various response examples.

HTTP

Basic authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. To use it, send your HTTP requests with an Authorization header that contains the word Basic followed by a space and a base64-encoded string username:password. 

Troubleshooting

If you’re having trouble integrating Call Verification, here are some tips:

  1. Check whether your calls are reaching Bandwidth by looking at your Call History (Log in to the Bandwidth App > Insights > Voice).
  2. If you see a call record showing up in Bandwidth with an error message, please open a ticket with the Bandwidth Support Team.
  3. If you don’t see a call record showing up in Bandwidth, this means the call was declined or rejected by your instance. In that case, please open a ticket with the Bandwidth Support Team.

Enabling Call Verification in the Bandwidth App

To enable Call Verification on a Voice Configuration Package (VCP) on the Universal Platform:

  1. Log in to the Bandwidth App.
  2. In the side navigation bar, select Service Management and click Voice Configuration.
  3. Select the configuration package or create a new one, and click the Enable Call Verification toggle.
  4. Click Update Package (or Create Package if creating a new VCP).

To enable Call Verification on a Location on the Legacy North American Platform:

  1. Log in to the Bandwidth App.
  2. In the side navigation bar, select Account and click Locations.
  3. Select the Location, switch to the Voice tab, and click the Enable Call Verification toggle.
  4. Click Save Changes.

To enable Call Verification on a phone number:

  1. Log in to the Bandwidth App.
  2. In the side navigation bar, select Numbers and click My Numbers.
  3. Locate the toll-free number and click it to navigate to its Phone Number Details page.
  4. Once on the Phone Number Details page, scroll down to the Call Verification Settings section and click the Call Verification Enabled toggle.
  5. Click Save.

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