Incorrect Caller ID

[iingham]

Hi everyone, we have a customer who used to share a building with another company. When they called us, the name of the other company would show up via caller ID, which was apparently expected.

They have since moved to a new location and kept the same number, but the caller ID is still displaying the old name. They are insisting that it's an issue on our end.

Aside from the fact that it doesn't appear to be that big of a deal, has anyone heard of this happening and the problem being on the recipient's end? We have a 5000HX with a PRI provided by Mitel/Netsolutions.

Thanks!

[bluewhite4]

Outbound Caller ID name is generally controlled by the carrier. I would give Net Solutions a call. It maybe that the billing name was never updated.

[iingham]

That's what I assumed as well, and I did call them, and they confirmed that it wasn't anything on their end. I was just curious if anyone else ran into something like this.

[dwayneg]

There are a couple of places within the 5000 where outbound caller ID (called CALLING PARTY NUMBER and CALLING PARTY NAME) are specified.  On is within programming of each phone (if you fix one, use copy/paste to fix all the others).  The other place is within CO TRUNK GROUPS.  Rarely have I seen a carrier actually let us specify a CALLING PARTY NAME, but I understand it's possible.  Anyway, check these fields.  If no name/number is specified for the phone it uses the trunk group name/number.  If none is specified for the trunk group it uses the carrier record for the PRI.  Ultimately I'm betting that since the number originally belonged to someone else (owner of the PRI) that is still the name-of-record associated with that number and will have to be changed by the controlling carrier.  Test is to make sure all those fields are blank in the 5000, make a call.  If you see the right number but not the name you want, it's on the carrier!   You can try to over-ride by putting a name in the CO TRUNK GROUP but I'm not optimistic the carrier will pay any attention to it. 
Fun experiment: if you put YOUR home phone number in the CALLING PARTY NUMBER field, bet you'll see your home number and home billing name on caller ID, it's getting the name through looking up the number.  All these name/number relationships are in gigantic tables at each carrier.  Note that if this is a recent change for this customer it sometimes takes quite a while to roll the change out to all the carriers (lookup appears to take place at the receiving end).

[DND ON]

I see this all the time. Carriers are all supposed to use the same database and perform regular updates, but they don’t. In my experience, Cox and Comcast are horrible.

At one site, we actually changed the phone number because we couldn’t get the carriers to update their database.