Decades ago, there was a popular television show known as “Dialing for Dollars.” Today, this is still a good metaphor for your business phone contact data – it is an important potential source of revenue. In this blog post, we will look at some of the ways you can leverage this phone data to improve your company’s bottom line.
Phone contact – a channel that continues to grow
In our omni-channel world, there are many ways to reach a customer or prospect, the telephone remains one of the most important ones. As of 2021, outbound telemarketing reached a market size of US $28.5 billion, with a projected growth rate of 3.5% per year. With the continued growth of mobile phones and SMS messages, it remains a critical and still-growing marketing channel for many businesses.
Meanwhile, on the service side of the equation, Hubspot notes that “Businesses need to invest in omni-channel support if they want to create a delightful experience for their customers.” There is a reason customer contact operations continue to be known as “call centers” and not “keyboard centers” – person-to-person voice contact remains an important part of both inbound and outbound customer transactions.
This brings us around to the importance of having accurate phone contact data. Statistics show that phone information is often the weak link in business contact data, with over half of numbers captured on lead forms being bogus or non-operational, 25% of numbers changing annually, and 2.8 million switching phone providers. More importantly, violations of regulations such as the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) carry steep fines of up to $1500 per call or text for unsolicited telephone marketing, particularly wireless users, requiring an automated process for detecting when numbers change.
How to automate your phone intelligence
Service Objects offers three business-grade products for managing your phone intelligence:
- DOTS GeoPhone Plus – our reverse-lookup service that appends caller name and address and phone exchange details
- DOTS Phone Append – uses name and address to append the contact’s phone number
- DOTS Phone Exchange – provides advanced intelligence including carrier and porting details
GeoPhone Plus service returns contact details, carrier and other essential phone data for numbers in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada, including nearly a quarter of a billion wireless numbers. They cross-reference US and Canadian name and addresses to append business and consumer phone numbers, and provide advanced phone intelligence including carrier, line type, country and location information.
These immediately power your contact data with bi-directional information about phone numbers, including:
- Appending current phone numbers based on name and address
- Quickly and accurately backfilling contact records with names and addresses based on phone numbers
- Flagging business versus residential customers
- Determining if a phone number can receive an SMS message
- Providing address geocoordinates for targeted marketing, regulatory compliance and more
- Confirming porting dates to avoid privacy and compliance issues
Phone Append service returns name and address to complete your contact records with missing consumer and business phone numbers. Cross-referencing your contact data against a proprietary database of 800 million records from 4,000 carriers,
Phone Exchange products are fast and efficient ways to access essential phone provider intelligence to help you stay compliant, flag the potential signs of fraud and keep sales teams and call centers armed with phone details they need.
- Phone Exchange accesses essential phone provider details including porting status and ported date, line type, carrier geo-coordinates and time zone.
- Phone Exchange – International validates and formats phone numbers for international direct dialing, and returns line type, country code and geocoding information to support compliance efforts.
As with all of our validation services, they integrate seamlessly with major business automation platforms via API interfaces, and are easy to integrate with your current marketing or customer service environment.
The next step: Give us a call
Your phone data holds the key to both building revenue and avoiding severe compliance penalties – and more importantly, today’s automated cloud-based capabilities make managing this data an important competitive issue.
We can help, and free, no-pressure consultation from our friendly product experts is as close as our phone number. (Or email if you prefer.) We’ll get back to you within 90 business minutes, listen to your business’s unique needs, and offer free product demos and trial licenses.
