Sept. 11, 2024
Tired of not being able to communicate with your customers because their phone numbers are wrong? In the digital age having accurate contact information is key to successful interactions and engagements with your customers. In this post, we'll examine what a phone number validation API is and why you should be validating phone numbers, to prevent fraud and improve customer experience. We'll look at the various methods of phone number validation, walk you through a few reputable API providers, and review best practices. A phone number validation API can help you achieve higher quality data, better manage your customer relationships, and grow your business.
A phone validation API is a great tool for businesses looking to optimize their data operations. It's a system that checks the validity and format of phone numbers in customer data, which is critical to customer interactions. In today's digital world and age of e-commerce, our ability to contact a customer has never been more critical. A phone validation API is what allows you to tell the difference between a real lead and a fake, and therefore what allows you to optimize your efforts for conversion.
The #1 reason you'd use a phone validation API is that it's a big driver of user data accuracy. By confirming real numbers are real, you can proactively weed out the fakes, leading to a better customer experience. Fake contact information can lead to issues like miscommunication and a poor brand impression. Plus, clean data lets you market more effectively and allocate resources more wisely, making it possible to go after real business.
What else is really neat about a phone validation API? It's in real time. When a user enters their phone number, the system checks if the number is valid right then. The real-time aspect of phone validation is very important, especially on signup forms or transaction confirmations. For instance, if a customer signs up with a fake number, the system will catch it right then and prompt the user to enter a different number. This means less follow-up for you and a better overall experience for the user.
Another benefit of using phone validation is that it's a tool to help prevent fraud. Many companies have trouble with fake or false phone numbers being entered on purpose. Whether as part of a scheme to pad your numbers or part of actual fraud, the numbers can be run through the system to see if they are real, or if not real and active, flagged for you. By filtering out the junk, you can also ensure that you are not wasting your resources on a bad lead.
Remember, phone number validation APIs can look really different depending on the provider. Consider coverage, pricing, and features when making your choice. Some APIs cover 190+ countries, while others only cover a few. Pricing varies a lot as well; some providers offer free trials with limited requests, while others have subscription plans that allow you to validate thousands of phone numbers a month. A strong phone validation API can help keep your customer data cleaner and help make your marketing and communication processes more efficient, which in turn will help you achieve a higher ROI on your business.
The digital world of communication is always changing, but good communication will always be in fashion. To ensure that you're as effective as possible, you'll want to integrate a phone number validation API to ensure you have accurate customer data. Not only does this help to prevent user error in data entry, but it also has implications for fraud prevention and CRM.
In the digital age, effective communication is everything - really. That's why phone number validation is a digital business essential - to make sure your marketing messages get to the right people, and to reduce fraud and compliance risk.
Phone number validation. In this section, we'll explore everything you need to know about phone number validation, including syntax checking, carrier lookups, line type identification, HLR lookups, geolocation checks, and more.
The first thing you should do whenever validating a phone number is syntax validation. Syntax validation ensures that phone numbers are correctly formatted, including the correct country code and the correct total number of digits. A valid-looking phone number can take different forms depending on the region -- for example, a U.S. phone number is typically 10 digits (not including the country code). You can use regex to perform a quick and easy check on phone number format.
Syntax validation is important, but it doesn't tell you whether the phone number is live and reachable. You'll need to use other validations, too, for a comprehensive verification strategy. A phone number might pass a syntax check but it might be assigned to a line that has been disconnected. That's why phone numbers require multi-check validation.
The cat climbed the 10-foot-tall tree and got stuck on the 3rd branch.
Knowing what type of line is which is crucial for effective customer engagement. You'll be able to determine whether a phone number is a landline, mobile, or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and then engage accordingly. Maybe you want to text a mobile number, or maybe you want to call a landline.
Different types of lines may also have different engagement rates. Mobile numbers may be held by someone who prefers brief communication via text or in-app messaging, while landlines may be held by someone who prefers more formal communication. Knowing what type of line is which will help you engage your customers more effectively and optimize your reach so you can reach the customers that are important to you and build a better relationship with them.
Use Home Location Register (HLR) lookups to validate phone numbers too -- it works like this: you're asking to see the real-time status of a mobile number, so you can check if the number is active, inactive, or out-of-service. You can also see if a number is roaming, which comes in handy if you're trying to get in touch with people in a certain location.
HLR lookups can be great for reducing bounce rates in your outreach efforts. A single erroneous or out-of-date number can add up over time. Use HLR checks to double-check that you're dialing valid numbers, so you can make the most of your campaign.
Geolocation checks add another validation layer to phone number validation by verifying where in the world phone numbers are associated. Some validation services offer APIs that provide the geographic background of a number so that businesses can ensure they're sending their outreach where the user is. This can be very useful so that businesses can send their marketing messages or offer services that are relevant to local markets and local needs.
E.g. If a business knows a number is from a certain area, they might want to offer promos or discounts that match local events or local trends. This kind of targeted outreach will lead to increased user engagement, trust, and a more personalized experience. Then, by validating whether a phone number is associated with specific geographic data, businesses can also use this to further user authentication and provide even more security and trust.
Accurately validated phone numbers are not just an item to check off your to-do list; they're a strategic way to connect with your users and keep your business safe from fraudulent activity. Use them all together to help ensure that your business is collecting and using accurate, valid contact information so that you can communicate effectively.
In the digital age, accuracy of customer information is a top priority for businesses and organizations. With the increasing number of online transactions and user registrations, phone number validation is an important tool for preventing fraud and maintaining high user engagement. In this post, we'll explore phone validation APIs that offer a variety of features to help you keep user information accurate.
AbstractAPI is amazing. It's really easy to use. Validates phone numbers in 190 countries instantly. And fits seamlessly into your current setup, so you've got everything you need to start building, right at your fingertips. Oh, and the best part? There's a free tier. Which means you can validate up to 250 phone numbers for free. Great for businesses or startups who want to qualify leads without making a commitment.
Plus, you won't just find out whether the phone number is valid, you'll receive a few other details, like carrier information, and the address linked to the phone. So you can personalize your communications to reach more potential customers.
NumVerify is another key player in the phone validation API space, with an expansive international reach. Its free offering is especially competitive, with 250 verifications included per month, so businesses can effectively assess the quality of their leads at no additional cost. NumVerify serves 232+ countries and is a good choice for a business that does business anywhere in the world.
Beyond confirming whether a phone number exists, NumVerify helps businesses distinguish the type of line it's associated with--mobile, landline, or VoIP--which can be important for understanding what kind of communications you'll need to engage in. If, for instance, you're conducting a predominantly SMS marketing campaign, you'll want to know if your contact is on a mobile line so you can tailor and target your messages more precisely.
Twilio's Verify API is super popular with developers who need to add user verification via one-time passwords (OTPs). With Verify, you can SMS or voice call verify users in your app. This helps make your app more secure and it's a good experience for the user because they're verified quickly.
You can send the verification codes and change the messages based on the trigger event. When you let the user verify themselves, you can establish trust and reduce fraud. We also have great logs and tracking so you can see how many verifications are happening. That can show you how users behave and how secure your app is.
IPQualityScore doesn't just validate phone numbers--it's a full solution that includes features like line type detection and risk scoring to help you prevent fraud, which makes it perfect for industries that are high-risk like finance or e-commerce.
The risk scoring tells you how risky a phone number is so you can act before it's too late. When you combine phone validation with fraud prevention, you act with confidence, and that has the effect of making your business more secure.
Sinch lets you verify phone numbers in more ways—SMS, voice, even data. It's all about choice. Giving users the method of communication they prefer means more users will successfully verify their phone number.
With Sinch, you're not just verifying phone numbers; you're also ensuring your messages get through. If someone doesn't receive an SMS, you can automatically initiate a voice call. When you have both SMS and voice, the result is a more dependable verification process, and you guessed it—more successes.
You can try different phone number validation APIs, benchmark what works for you, harden your fraud prevention, and improve your user experience overall.
In the age of digital communication, precision matters when it comes to reaching your customer. That's where phone number validation comes in. With phone validation APIs, you can streamline your business processes to ensure your data is clean, accurate, and working for you. Here are some of our favorite reasons for using them.
When you use a phone number validation API, one of the real benefits is that it'll clean your data. When you collect customer data, one of the most important things is that the data is accurate. Without accurate data, you can't effectively market to people or engage with them. By plugging a phone validation API into your tools, you can easily identify and remove invalid or fake phone numbers. That's cleaning your data. That means your marketing team can actually target their campaigns better and see better engagement. When people have accurate contact information, you can reach out to your customers more effectively, which means you'll increase your customer satisfaction and loyalty. For instance, if you're sending out an SMS blast, you can rest easy knowing the numbers in your database are valid, and you aren't throwing money away texting a brick wall.
Don't make numbers up. Avoid having numbers. Only have numbers in your output.
Real-time updating is one of the many timesaving benefits of phone number validation APIs. By validating numbers as they are input into your website or app you can make sure that only real numbers end up in your database. This helps companies be proactive about minimizing operations costs by not wasting resources on direct communications that are wrong numbers, or that bounce back. For example, a company that keeps their database up-to-date with validation APIs will save in direct communication costs, but also in overall efficiency of the customer contact process by streamlining the process.
When you're onboarding someone, phone validation is smooth for the user. Validating a phone number in real time means the user gets instant feedback that their information is secure and correct, so they can get into their account faster than if they'd had to verify their phone number through other methods, like during sign up or checkout. A frictionless validation experience makes the path to purchase a more frictionless experience, which means more purchases and a better experience overall, because the user isn't hitting snags that lead to cart abandonment or frustration.
Regulatory compliance like GDPR and TCPA is so important for any modern business--otherwise, you risk facing steep fines, legal battles, and damage to your reputation. Phone number validation APIs empower businesses to stay compliant, ensuring customer phone numbers are being collected and stored appropriately as per the regulations. That way you can concentrate on marketing, customer engagement, and not have to worry about whether your data practices are appropriate. Plus, with a validation service, you can reduce the risks associated with unwanted communication and build a relationship of trust between you and your customers.
In the digital age, reliable contact data is more critical than ever. A phone number validation API doesn't just enable direct communications; it mitigates risk. From getting started to getting sophisticated, we outline the steps businesses can take to get the most out of phone number validation APIs in this post, focusing on three core areas: data quality, coverage, and user experience.
E.164 is how phone numbers should be formatted globally, so you can easily store and work with them. E.164 numbers are so predictable you can look at a number and know it's in E.164 format at a glance. It's just a country code, a national number, no spaces, no dashes, no funny characters, like +14155552671, where +1 is the country code.
Storing numbers in E.164 format means you can avoid a whole range of issues that can come up from inconsistent formats. With mobile fraud rates continuing to grow, keeping everything in an easily recognizable format makes it easy to spot fraud and easy to scale. Pair that with a powerful validation API, and you can instantly validate and normalize your incoming numbers to E.164, and store E.164 every time.
Use separate country code input fields and validate your international phone numbers in a snap. Phone numbers are a common piece of information to collect. They have a general format, but it can get pretty crunched up and hard to read—especially when different country codes are involved. When you break out country codes into a separate input field, it's easier to validate numbers and reduce potential input errors.
For example, instead of asking your user to input their entire phone number in one string (which can be challenging to interpret in terms of formatting), you can make two fields: one for the country code and another for the rest of the phone number. This doesn't just make your data more accurate; it also makes it easier to automatically format phone numbers into E.164. Adding a country code dropdown will also reduce ambiguity for your users. They can select their country from a list, meaning they're less likely to accidentally give you the wrong number.
You want to be able to do real-time validation so that when a user enters in a phone number, you can check to see if it's a valid phone number (i.e. that it exists in the country you're targeting) and that it has the right country code in it. Why is this important? Because you're probably going to be asking your users for their phone number on a form, and you'll want to do real-time validation so that you can tell the user right away whether they're inputting their phone number correctly or not.
For example, if a user forgets to include a country code, you want your system to be able to tell the user right away that they're making a mistake. You don't want to make the user wait until they've completed the form. Real-time validation doesn't just help you capture valid phone numbers, it helps you educate your user. How? Your users don't only live in the United States so it's pretty likely that many of your international users have no idea what a valid phone number looks like. Real-time validation will actually teach the user what a valid phone number looks like.
Keep your database up to date. This will help you remove old or incorrect numbers and ensure your customer data stays in good shape for efficient communications, and a clean database overall. Phone numbers change for many reasons over time—whether users change numbers or carriers change ownership.
With a phone number validation API, businesses can automate keeping their database clean, saving them time to achieve higher contact rates and stronger customer engagement, not to mention avoid costly miscommunication. By keeping a clean list you can know the second a number becomes invalid—and only market to the best of the best info.
When validating something, especially when it's personal information, you want to let your user know what to fix, and how to fix it.
For example, if I'm validating a phone number and someone tries to send a phone number without a country code, or the phone number is too long to be a valid number in that country, I want to show a validation message immediately, letting them know exactly what they need to fix.
The validation message should be ultra descriptive and helpful, maybe even linking to examples or formatting so the user knows what action needs to be taken without any uncertainty.
By doing this in your phone number validation API integration, you'll be able to have a more accurate phone number, your users will trust you more, and your data will be in a more secure place. As best practices get better, staying current will help organizations handle user data much better, and without risks of communication-related failures or fraud.
Phone validation services help you keep in touch with today's customer—in a verification, real-time way. Phone validation service lets you confirm that a phone number is valid and in service in real-time, and that it's formatted properly. So you get better data, lower fraud, and a better experience for customers. There are lots of kinds of phone validation. You can look at the syntax, the carrier, the line type, do HLR lookups, check location, and more—to ensure you're only collecting valid, active phone numbers. Each service has different features and pricing, so you have a lot of choice for your business. If you do it right (like use E.164 formatting, and give customers feedback in real-time as they're entering their number), you can really tighten up your business to be compliant, fraud-free and give your customers a lot more delight.
A phone number validation API is a tool that businesses can use to make sure phone numbers are a) real and b) in the right format when users enter them. It matters because you want to trust you're getting correct customer information, so you can outreach. In an increasingly digital world, having accurate contact information helps companies distinguish between real leads and potential scams, which results in better data quality and better user experience.
By checking and validating phone numbers in real time, a phone validation API eradicates errors and ensures businesses only ever communicate with genuine, working phone numbers. This means better customer experiences -- their calls won't be missed and they won't experience any issues due to incorrect contact data. Clean, high-quality data empowers marketing teams to concentrate on more valid leads, bringing in more engagement and more effective use of your marketing budget.
Considerations include if an API offers real-time verification, can be used internationally, carrier lookups, line type detection, fraud detection, cost, the availability of a free trial, and what else the API offers (geographic data, etc.). More feature-rich APIs can do your data cleaning for you and make your communications easier.
Common methods include syntax checking to make sure numbers follow a certain format, carrier lookups to see what telco is associated with that number, line type identification to see if it's a landline, mobile, or VoIP, Home Location Register (HLR) lookups for real-time checks, and geolocation checks to see what areas this phone number is associated with. All of these methods together will give us a good verification process.
Using these phone number verification APIs, you can have a first line of defense to prevent fraud in place. Things like fake account sign-ups can be easily caught. They can flag suspicious numbers and stop them from even interacting with legitimate users. This means not only are you protecting sensitive information, you're protecting your business operations proactively and not risking financial losses to scams.
Companies should use the E.164 format, break out the country code so you don't get weird edge cases, real-time validation for instant feedback, and keep your database clean by removing invalid numbers.
You also need to provide clear, actionable feedback to users when they're validating their phone number so they can do exactly that. Tell them what's wrong with their input and how to fix it.
All these things will mean more accurate data, happier users, and no time wasted trying to reach an invalid number.
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