Like many of us have experienced with email lists, SMS and MMS subscription lists can begin to collect bad phone numbers. Factors including typos, fake numbers, or even a legitimate number that’s gone out of service at the time you send can contribute to undeliverable phone numbers stacking up on your list.

Why Does It Matter?

Unfortunately, you will be charged for every message sent, sometimes including carrier pass-through fees (yeah, we know!), regardless of whether it was properly delivered or not. In other words, if you have a compromised list, you’re overpaying on your outbound messages. Plus, depending on your messaging use case, not being able to reach the intended end user could result in a negative customer experience (we take a close look at this in Scenario 2 below). And finally, your overall KPIs may be skewed if you’re measuring against a misleading list size or unknowingly can’t reach the intended end user. As your business and lists scale, this can really begin to impact your messaging ROI.

How To Avoid This

By using a Number Lookup API, a messaging API provider can verify that the phone numbers you’re texting are real and in service, prior to sending a text message. By using this tool, you can help ensure that you’re only paying to send messages to deliverable numbers and prevent jeopardizing customer experience with real-time number verification.

At Telgorithm, we have a Lookup API that we call Number Verification – we offer this to our customers at a super low cost ($0.0009/number) so you don’t have to worry about whether or not your lists are clean. And while many providers do have a version of a Number Verification tool, ours is differentiated in that it tells you if the number is currently live and in service at that given point in time – others don’t.

To further illustrate why utilizing a Number Lookup is a great way to be proactive about your messaging list management, here are two sample scenarios.

Scenario 1: My List is a Mess

Customers on my SMS application are finding that a portion of their sent messages are going to numbers that are either not real (most frequently due to user errors like typos), or not in service (at the time the messages are being sent). I suspect my customers also have numbers like these in their general databases. I’m getting charged for all sent messages, even to fake numbers (and many times including pass-through fees – go figure). I want to help my customers clean out their lists so that I’m only paying to send to functioning numbers, which should also have a positive impact on these customers’ performance and therefore experience with my application.

What This Person Needs: A way of automatically knowing if a number is real and currently in-service prior to sending a text.

The Solution: A Number Verification that proactively scans your list and keeps them clean of fake or inactive numbers. With this, they will save on costs and provide a better experience to their customers.  

Scenario 2: My Customers Lose Business if Numbers Aren’t Taken Down Correctly in Real-Time

One way customers on my CRM platform use SMS messaging is for connecting their customers with real-time support. For example, a customer in the home services industry will receive a call from a homeowner who was locked out of their home and needs a locksmith immediately. A customer service representative (CSR) takes down their information, including a phone number that they can be reached. If the CSR accidentally hits a wrong digit or mishears the homeowner, when the company later attempts to contact the homeowner from my CRM, the message won’t reach them.

The homeowner is now waiting and doesn’t hear from my customer – they call back but don’t get through quick enough. Frustrated and desperate to get inside, they call a competitor who is able to help them out. My CRM is still charged/charges my customer for any messages that were sent out in an attempt to reach this homeowner – what a mess!

What This Person Needs: The ability to automatically verify a phone number in real-time to help avoid situations like this one altogether.

How A Number Lookup API Can Solve This: If the CRM platform was using Telgorithm’s Number Verification, the moment the CSR hits ‘enter’ on the keyboard with the faulty number, an error message would come back with something along the lines of ‘phone number is invalid, please re-confirm’. Then, with the homeowner still on the line, the CSR is able to read the number back to the homeowner and confirm that it’s correct and/or the best number to use. The homeowner’s request is completed, they have a great experience with our customer, and no one pays for messages that are being sent to a bad phone number.

To learn more about Telgorithm’s Number Verification, reach out to our team today!