Phone Number Validation is the number one tool for the Data Hygienist to ensure that phone numbers in their lists are clean, correct and useful. Executing any phone campaign without proper phone number validation can waste precious time and money. Working with international clients adds new challenges, requiring your phone number lists to be properly formatted for routing within a country, as well as internationally.
Working domestically also presents its own challenges through maintaining FCC compliance in marketing efforts to mobile users. With over 6 billion registered mobile phones, the demand to ensure phone numbers are correct, dialable, and FCC compliant was never greater.
International phone validation
DOTS Phone Exchange 2 now offers a complete validation and formatting solution for domestic and international phone numbers. The latest operation, GetInternationalExchangeInfo provides validation of phone numbers for a valid sequence in addition to region checking to ensure the provided number belongs to the region input. With this new feature, users can validate a phone number belongs to a region using any number of formats including ISO2, ISO3, or full Country name. It can even deduce a country from a provided IP as country input.
While providing a country verifies that a number belongs to a region, it is not required assuming a phone number is a valid numbering scheme and includes the country code. With a provided country code, the operation will return all country name information in several formats including ISO2, ISO3, and full country name.
In addition to formatting and country information, The GetInternationalExchangeInfo operation also returns Line Type, Location Information, Time Zone, Phone Carrier as well as SMS/MMS address information where available.
International phone formatting
To ensure proper routing of a number, it is highly recommended to use the E.164 format. The E.164 format includes all relevant information to route a call or deliver an SMS/MMS message. The internationally recognized E.164 format consists of the following: [+][CountryCode][[AreaCode][SubscriberNumber]
DOTS Phone Exchange 2 provides E.164 formatting as an output in the latest GetInternationalExchangeInfo operation.
Phone number portability
Launching phone marketing and sales campaigns domestically requires organizations to maintain FCC compliance. It is critical to gain insight on whether a phone number is wireless to maintain compliance. With only 40% of consumers still keeping their landline phones, a majority have transitioned to mobile devices, some of them porting their landline number to their wireless device. DOTS Phone Exchange 2 provides a real-time lookup for determining if a number has been ported, and to find its current line type in the GetExchangeInfo operation. In addition to FCC compliance, Line Porting information gives valuable insight into a contact’s mobility from carrier to carrier, as well as a date when the phone number was last ported.
Portable VOIP detection
At Service Objects, fighting fraud and reducing waste is one of our core corporate values. We take fraud prevention seriously, especially when it comes to VOIP detection. One of the biggest perpetrators of fraud these days is users with Portable VOIP phone lines. Portable VOIP allows a user to register a local phone number from overseas without providing an address. This gives fraudsters the ability to commit fraud without traceability. An upcoming feature for the GetExchangeInfo operation will identify these types of numbers in real-time, and alert administrators to throw up the red flag when a contact enters a system using one of these numbers. Portable VOIP detection will be available to all users of the GetExchangeInfo operation in early September.
