100% this is the way. For short words I’ll just spell it out and then do it in NATO such as ‘That’s Via benefits, V-I-A Victor India Alpha’ and that also seems to register with them.

Working in a call center, I can definitely agree that you don’t need to know the proper NATO phonetic alphabet, because ‘A as in apple’ and ‘M as in Mary’ work just as well.

But I do wish more people would say something to that effect because I lose more than 3 seconds every day to ‘Did you say N or M’ while on the phones.