How Phone Verification Can Help Your Business

What is Phone Verification?

Phone validation APIs reviews phone numbers and ensures they’re both valid and in use. This prevents you from calling numbers that are fake or no longer in use, saving your business time and money.

Many businesses incorporate a phone number validation service into their regular marketing and communication strategies. This software can be used as a precursor to marketing campaigns and any number of other uses, which we’ll cover more in-depth later on.

Why Your Business Should Use Phone Verification

There are a wide variety of reasons companies invest in validating telephone numbers. Some are related to the nature of the business, such as financial institutions that use phone validation software to ensure sensitive information goes to the correct person. Other businesses simply use it to better serve customers, such as restaurant chains that use this software to send location-specific discounts and food recommendations.

More basic benefits that telephone verification offers include boosting deliverability by removing invalid and inactive numbers from campaign lists, increasing conversion rates due to better targeting, and standardizing contact lists prior to use. In addition to these, customers receive more personalized service and better support.

Though these are convincing on their own, they become particularly impressive when combined with the other advantages listed below.

Versatility

Verification services are primarily used for time phone number validation. However, they also have a wide variety of other uses and benefits. Programmable web-based APIs are particularly scalable and best suited to fit the unique marketing and communication needs of any sized business.

Besides using these APIs to verify phone numbers, businesses can also use them for:

• Two-factor authentication – for businesses that use two-factor authentication (2FA), verification APIs are used to ensure the authentication factors (passwords, PINs, QR codes, etc.) are being sent to the right person.
• Text subscriptions – verifying a telephone number ensures that businesses only contact eligible customers for opt-in SMS and text campaigns, or that all currently enrolled subscribers are actually receiving the texts.
• Verifying customers’ identities – phone verification opens up several avenues for businesses to verify customers’ identities, including calling the individual and comparing the verified contact information to secondary sources.

Verification APIs are useful beyond their primary service, as verifying a telephone number impacts a number of other services. This is what makes it such a versatile software which easily adapt to the needs of each business.

Customization

As briefly mentioned earlier, using a phone verification service allows you to better customize your customer communication and service. This is largely due to the sheer amount of information these APIs can return for each number.

• Geographic information – APIs return a variety of geographic information related to each phone number, including: country, state, county, ZIP code, time zone, rate center, and even longitude and latitude.
• Wireless information – every phone number is either registered as a mobile phone number or a wireless phone number, and APIs will sort through each and differentiate them for you.
• Email Information – verification services can also return information related to email addresses, such as the email domain and SMTP email string data associated with a person’s cell phone provider.

The quantity of information returned is up to the discretion of each business, but the possibilities and applications are practically endless.

Accuracy

The verification of telephone numbers obviously benefits companies in the present, since it provides real-time feedback and number scrubbing. However, it also benefits businesses in the future by providing them with better data.

• Informed decisions – without invalid numbers skewing campaign results and data, your company can make more informed decisions about campaign changes, effectiveness, and area for improvement.
• Campaign data – because all of the contact information for a campaign is correct, the data returned from that campaign can be confidently collected, analyzed, and used for present or future research.

With the data provided by number verification, companies can tweak a campaign to perfection or completely revamp their outreach programs.

Cost

There are two elements to the cost benefits of using verification APIs. The first relates to the API itself, while the second relates to the service the API provides.

• API costs – the best API services are those that are volume-based, which means that you only pay for as much service as you need; these pay-as-you-go subscriptions adapt as the company grows.
• Service savings – signing up for a validation API saves you time and money by removing invalid and unused numbers from your contact lists before companies waste resources trying to call or text those numbers.

So not only are phone verification services cost-effective and affordable for every company’s budget, they also pay for themselves by immediately saving companies money, time, and resources.

Risk

Risk mitigation is a huge part of any company and can often be frustrating, so it may be surprising to learn that simply using phone verification APIs reduces risk.

• Contact restrictions – validation software defines time zones to restrict calling times to those that fall within state and federal regulations, preemptively avoiding accidental compliance violations.
• Customer satisfaction – though this isn’t strictly risk mitigation, contact customers within safe harbor hour does ensure your company doesn’t run the risk of upsetting and potentially alienating the customer.

Using a verification API provides the highest levels of risk mitigation. When businesses integrate these APIs into their communication strategy, they’re also effortlessly ensuring compliance and the best customer experience possible.