The Call Businesses Can No Longer Make 

By Tomiwa Aghedo 

For as long as anyone has done business in Nigeria, the phone call was an asset you owned. A number to reach a customer, confirm an order, chase a payment, close a deal. It was the most direct line a company had to the people it served. That asset has quietly turned into a liability, and most businesses have not adjusted their thinking to match. 

The reason is simple and brutal. More than one in every two calls Nigerians now receive from an unknown number is flagged as spam or fraud, the highest rate in Africa. So people have learned the only rational defence: ignore the unknown number. Let it ring out, assume the worst. 

That single, sensible habit, multiplied across a whole country, means the channel businesses have relied on for decades no longer reliably works. When customers stop trusting unknown callers, they stop trusting your call too. The call still connects. It just no longer gets picked. 

This is not a small-business problem or a big-business problem. It is both. 

For the small business, it is the deal that dies in silence. You call a customer back about the order they enquired about yesterday. They do not recognise the number, assume it is a scam, and let it ring out. You never get a second chance, because they never knew it was you. For a one-person shop or a growing SME, whose entire pipeline depends on being reachable, every ignored call is revenue that simply evaporates, with no invoice to record the loss. 

For the logistics and delivery business, it is the failed drop. The rider calls from the road to confirm the address, the customer sees an unknown number and ignores it, and the package bounces back to the depot. Now you are paying twice to deliver once, and the customer blames you for a failure that started with a call they were too wary to answer. Multiply that across thousands of deliveries and the cost stops being an inconvenience and becomes a line on the balance sheet. 

For the telecom operator, it is stranger still. The networks carry the very traffic that has poisoned the well, and they also depend on reaching their own subscribers, for renewals, service messages and support. When their outbound calls land in the same suspicious silence as everyone else’s, the operator is undermined by the exact channel it runs. 

And for the bank, it is the deepest cut of all, because the bank did this to itself for the best possible reason. For years, banks told customers a simple, correct thing: we will never call you to ask for your details. That message worked. Customers internalised it. But it also trained an entire market to distrust a call that claims to be from the bank. 

Which means the bank’s own legitimate outbound calls, the genuine fraud alert, the real card-services team, the actual relationship manager, now arrive pre-suspected. The institution most dependent on being trusted on the phone is the one that can least use the phone at all. 

Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. A bank, a telco, a delivery firm, a corner shop: wildly different businesses, all quietly losing the same asset for the same reason. 

The phone call, once the most trusted line between a company and its customer, has become a channel none of them can rely on because none of them can prove, in the moment it matters, that the call is genuinely theirs. 

That is the real problem underneath all of it. Not that businesses are being impersonated, though they are. Not that customers are being scammed, though they are. The structural cost is that legitimate businesses have lost the ability to prove they are legitimate on the one channel where it counts, at the one moment a customer decides whether to trust the ring. 

Which points to the only durable fix: identity has to travel with the call. 

This is where services such as Truecaller for Business change the equation. Its Verified Business Caller ID allows a business to establish a verified identity on calls, including its name, logo and business category, rather than leaving the customer to guess who is behind an unfamiliar number. Truecaller also offers Business Call Reason, allowing businesses to give customers context for why they are calling before the call is answered. 

That distinction matters. The answer is not asking customers to become better detectives. It is giving them better information. For a customer waiting for a delivery, a call that arrives with a verified business identity and clear context is fundamentally different from an anonymous number. For someone receiving a call from their bank, the difference between “unknown number”and a verified business identity is not cosmetic; it gives the customer an additional signal with which to make an informed decision. 

And for businesses, the significance goes beyond a logo appearing on a screen. Truecaller’s business tools are designed around the idea that identity, trust and context should become part of the communication itself. Its Secure Call capability can authenticate calls from verified businesses and display a “Secure Call”indication, while its APIs can integrate these capabilities into existing calling infrastructure. 

That is the shift businesses need to make: from simply owning a phone number to owning a verifiable identity behind that number. 

A verified identity does not make every call welcome, and it should not. Customers should still be free to ignore unwanted communication. But it changes the starting point. The customer no longer has to ask, “Who is this number?”before deciding whether the call deserves attention. 

For a business, that verifiable identity is becoming as fundamental as a signboard once was. A shop without a name over the door does not get walked into. A company that cannot establish who is calling does not get answered. 

In a market where unknown calls are increasingly associated with fraud, being reachable is no longer about having your customers’ numbers. It is about your customers being willing to pick up when you call. And that willingness now has to be earned, communicated and proven on every ring. 

The businesses that solve this early will keep the trust their competitors are losing. The ones that continue treating the phone as the reliable asset it used to be will keep wondering why fewer and fewer people pick up.