We recently published a blog that took a deep dive into our reverse-phone lookup service, DOTS GeoPhone Plus. That blog highlighted some of the ins, out and returns of our service, largely focusing on some of the returns in the provider and contact portions of the service.
To supplement that blog, we wanted to highlight the Note Codes and fields that the service can return and provide extra insights and information that can be derived from your data.
Below is an overview of these Note Codes and text descriptions, along with some insights from these pieces of information.
| NoteCode | NoteDescription | Meaning |
| 1 | IsMailable | Indicates that address in the Contact node can receive mail from the USPS. This can be helpful if you are trying to reach out to a contact through a physical mailing campaign. This address is typically more reliable to reach your contact if it is associated with a landline as opposed to a wireless or VOIP number. |
| 2 | IsConnected | Indicates that the number is active and has an active subscriber associated. If you are trying to target leads who are most likely to respond, contacting numbers with this note code are far more likely to have someone on the other end of the number. |
| 3 | IsPorted | The number in question has moved from one provider to another. This happens frequently with wireless numbers when subscribers switch carriers, but can also happen in switching a landline to a wireless number. If numbers have switched from a landline to a mobile number it can open up new avenues of communication towards clients like texting or utilizing the SMS or MMS address associated with a wireless number. If this field is present, it will be accompanied with a Date of Porting, which will indicate when the number was first ported. |
| 4 | IsWireless | The number in question is a wireless number. As mentioned above, this opens up the avenue for SMS and MMS communications to the contact. |
| 5 | IsUnknownContact | This code will let the user know that there was no contact information associated with the number. For these cases the service will still be able to return information in the provider node that the service returns. |
| 6 | IsUnknownProvider | This is an older Note Code in the service and we don’t expect it to come up in a normal production scenario. We would generally consider numbers without provider information to be invalid, and as such the service will return an error for these cases. |
| 7 | IsTollFreeNumber | This will come up for 800 numbers and other toll free numbers. If you are trying to target numbers where you have a higher chance of speaking to a person or business associated with the number then you might want to exclude these numbers from campaigns. |
| 8 | IsGoogleVoiceNumber | Indicates that the given number is a Google Voice number. While there are a lot of legitimate Google Voice numbers, these can often be an avenue that fraudsters use, and many clients use this flag to avoid these numbers. |
| 9 | IsSkypeNumber | As with Google Voice numbers, Skype numbers can also be used for fraudulent purposes more often than other phone numbers. |
| 10 | IsPossibleDisconnected | This flag means that there is no registered subscriber associated with the phone number. This is generally a good sign that the phone number could be disconnected. |
| 11 | IsPortableVOIP | The given phone number is registered to a phone carrier that provides phone number registration without a physical address. Some clients consider these numbers to more likely be associated with fraudulent purposes. |
| 12 | IsPossiblePortableVOIP | As with the code above, this code also indicates that the given number may be registered with a carrier that allows for phone number registration without a physical address. Clients also generally consider these to be more likely associated with fraud. |
Hopefully, the above notes and explanations for our GeoPhone Plus service will help you identify and target contacts in the most efficient way.
Each use case will be different, so if you have any questions about how to best leverage your reverse-phone lookup integration, please reach out to us! We are happy to help get you up and running with your implementation.
