In today’s article, we’ll learn why phone validation is vital for your digital environment. You should either collect the correct mobile or landline phone number at the time of entry or verify all of the phone numbers in your existing database in bulk to clean up your phone numbers.
Because of the historical overuse of promotional SMS and unwanted cold calls from both genuine and phishing sources, as well as the fact that phone numbers are a more established and, therefore, more traditional form of contact, they are frequently disregarded as a means of identifying customers. Ah, the lowly phone number.
Requesting a customer’s phone number during the registration process is, and continues to be, either an utterly voluntary data point or one that many online retailers do not collect. But in this day and age, when bogus email addresses, spam, and accounts produced by bots outweigh the real ones, many security researchers are searching for new customer validation solutions that are even safer.
The first is a service that verifies email addresses, and the second is a phone number validation service. Both of these are extremely important in the mobile-first and app-development industries. You probably already use live authentication SMS regularly. When you sign up for an account with a new online store, instead of receiving yet another tedious account activation email that takes an eternity to arrive and ultimately winds up in your spam folder, you receive an instant SMS to your phone with an activation code. Your mobile device automatically detects the code and enters it into the authentication field on the website or in the app. Seamless.
The only problem is that you gave the wrong phone number when you registered. Because the activation text never reached your phone, you could not access your account since it was never correctly activated.
First things first, let’s go back to a level. Verifying a phone number at the point of input involves ensuring that the number is formatted correctly and has the appropriate amount of digits. The Phone Number Verification service provided by Email Oversight operates in real-time to check the formatting of the country and area code, the type of number, and whether or not it is a valid and active phone number, and it can even return details of the network carrier to you.
Integrating the service into your form field error handling to ensure that a user can’t proceed with an invalid entry increases your data accuracy for genuine customers while also helping to reduce spam and fraudulent registrations, which improves data quality. This result is accomplished by ensuring that the user can’t proceed with an invalid entry. In addition, it guarantees that you will be able to send the Authentication SMS required for your smooth customer registration. When you consider all the other ways your company uses or may use phone numbers, the real benefit of phone validation becomes obvious across all customer interactions. By using the Email Oversight phone validation service, you will be able to put your correct data to work for you in the following ways:
- Customer segmentation involves categorizing clients according to their nation, area code, and whether they use a landline or a mobile phone. This aspect is crucial to keep in mind if your company does not engage in e-commerce and does not need a physical location.
- Data Protection and Compliance — If you have correct information on a customer’s phone number, you can regularly re-verify the customer’s identity and keep safe access.
- Fraud prevention can be accomplished by validating the authenticity of phone numbers and including this step in the registration authentication process. When combined with using a unique instance of both email and phone, you can significantly cut down on the number of spam registrations that do not contribute anything of value to your company and affect the data quality and deliverability.
- Improved CRM includes contacting customers on the channels they like most and new channels to boost engagement, retention, LTV, and SMS promotional messages.
- You may achieve a more satisfying user experience by streamlining the authentication procedure and achieving more precision than is possible with the more conventional approaches.
- Communication has been improved by using precisely sent SMS communications for shipping update purposes, which lowers the number of calls received at contact centers. Take down the correct phone numbers of customers who have requested a callback as part of your pre-sale and after-sale support services.
- Tracking the behavior of customers across several platforms and channels with cross-platform authentication is part of data intelligence.
It would be best if you did not overlook the importance of validating data. Because billions of active phone numbers are in use around the globe, a simple validation tool may significantly cut the chances of a security breach occurring as it boosts customer happiness and trust ratings.
Utilize a Real-Time API to Check the Accuracy of Phone Numbers
The real-time validation tool that we have here at Email Oversight makes it more straightforward than ever to check whether a customer’s phone number is legitimate. This tool helps to verify that all client phone numbers are accurate, allowing you to reach them with complete confidence and preventing you from wasting time or bothering the incorrect numbers. The Email Oversight API gives you access to the full power of all of our real-time validation checks, allowing you to provide a seamless experience for both your employees and your customers.
Where to make use of validating a phone number
On websites
Make sure the numbers collected in your web forms are correct.
Apps-based
Make sure the forms of your apps are filled out with the correct numbers.
When using your CRM
Ensure that the staff has entered the numbers accurately and that the numbers taken over the phone are accurate.
Email Oversight:
We were an industry leader in developing SaaS solutions for address search and data validation. Every day, we execute millions of data transactions for thousands of customers whose businesses range from fledgling e-commerce ventures to well-known household names. Our two most prominent products, Address Auto-Complete and Postcode Lookup, lessen the amount of effort required to complete a purchase, which can increase the conversion rate by up to forty percent. Additionally, they can assist in reducing unsuccessful deliveries by as much as seventy-five percent. We have distinguished ourselves in the market by the simplicity of our integration and the quality of our service.
