Research studies show that Americans check their phones once every 5.5 minutes—or approximately 262 times per day1. While this stat may seem exciting to business leaders who are eager to reach their clients via text and phone, having the wrong number for a client will only lead you to a dead end. Not only does accurate phone data play a pivotal role in reaching customers, but it also has a far-reaching impact on a business’s customer experience, reputation, and everyday operations. Fortunately, phone validation can fix data quality issues that pose as a barrier by ensuring customer data validity from the start.
In this article, we’ll look at phone validation and what this service can do to benefit your business and increase your customer data accuracy
What is phone validation?
As the name suggests, phone validation focuses on validating if a given number is accurate and tied to the correct user. Before we delve further into what phone validation is, let’s examine how phone data can be shared within a business:
- Call centers: Call center representatives who collect and type out a phone number on behalf of the customer on the other end of the line
- Self-service forms: Users and clients who type out their own phone number through self-service forms online
- 3rd party data providers: Marketing lists provided to businesses from a 3rd party data provider
Whether you’ve collected phone data directly from the consumer, an employee, or a 3rd party provider, phone validation scans a number against data provided by telecommunication companies to determine whether a phone number is active and valid. This service can occur in real time or as a bulk service to clean up existing client data.
3 ways phone validation improves customer data accuracy
Phone validation is a helpful way to verify if a given phone number is real and working. While it may seem like you’re just expanding your database on the surface, the impact of phone validation is much more extensive and impacts the correctness of your overall data. Below, we’ll examine 3 ways that phone validation can enhance your customer’s data accuracy to help your business thrive:
1. Confirms accuracy of data
Think about all the client information that enters your business’s database every single day. It’s easy for a call center representative to mistype a customer’s data. Clients may also accidentally find themselves pressing the wrong key on their computer when filling out the phone number section of a form—unknowingly submitting the wrong contact information as a result. With phone validation, you’ll be able to clean phone numbers at their point of entry and confirm that the number entering your database is accurate. Real-time phone validation services will also alert you to fake numbers instantly. Every time a new number is inserted into your database, you’ll have the confidence necessary to know that it’s real, accurate, and attached to the correct customer profile.
2. Expands existing data
Sometimes, you only have a fractional identifier in your database for a given client. For instance, you may have just a client’s name and address. But when you have a more complete customer profile, your data is more likely to be accurate. Phone validation strengthens your data by expanding your existing database with key information. For instance, you can choose to append phone numbers to names and addresses which can provide a complete view of a single customer. Then, the numbers can be cleansed to identify which are valid and whether they’re landline or mobile numbers. Not only will these actions grant your business access to more reliable contact data, but they will also help you build a stronger connection with your client base, too.
3.) Change data errors in real time
As a real-time service, interactive phone validation helps prevent incorrect phone numbers from entering your database in the first place. As a client types out their phone number into an online form, they’ll be prompted to provide a correction if they insert a digit wrong. How does this impact your customer data accuracy? By incorporating interactive phone validation at the point of capture, you can quickly identify invalid phone numbers and prompt the end-user to make edits or corrections when necessary. Since data is ever-changing, you’re likely to find that a percentage of phone numbers stored in your database reflect outdated phone numbers no longer in use by your clients.
Experience the far-reaching impact of phone validation
Our recent research shows that 86 percent of businesses believe that data management investments directly impact their business’s growth, and solidifying correct data will play a crucial role in achieving this goal. Phone validation grants you access to the information you need to expand and clean your existing database—which will have a ripple effect on your business’s performance.
Gaining access to accurate data shouldn’t be a hassle. With Experian’s phone validation services, you can begin to expand your existing database with insightful and key data today.
Sources:
1Wheelwright, Trevor. (2021, April 21). Cell Phone Behavior in 2021: How Obsessed Are We? Reviews.org https://www.reviews.org/mobile/cell-phone-addiction/
