At present, businesses are able to connect digitally with customers. It’s way easier than before to reach out to new and existing customers, especially through their phones. Every digital service requires phone authentication to access your own details. You cannot even exchange a piece of information unless you enter the correct contact credentials. Even, banks or apps ask to share an active and valid phone number for successfully completing the Know Your Customer (KYC) authentication.
Various BPO companies or data vendors keep a contact list of prospects. They even sell and cleanse such listings to achieve complementary goals, such as lead generation, increasing sales, surveys, etc. Simply put, it’s easier to discover opportunities if you have fresh, and authentic phone details.
The vitality of phone numbers lies in their authenticity. For this purpose, there are BPO companies that verify contact lists. With verified records, any company can get rid of fraud & losses. Take into account that bad data costs a loss of thousands of dollars. This loss is worth USD 3.1 trillion every year. It is confirmed in 2016 through an IDC-released report. Such big losses are unbearable and painful for customers and companies also.
This post will let you interact with the concept of phone verification and how it can help in generating more business or onboarding customers.
What is Phone Verification?
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As it suggests, phone verification is the process of confirming that the contact number of the customer is valid, active, and authentic. If it is found so, it’s easy to understand that the customer is real and can be tapped as a prospect.
It’s similar to verifying your social or Google account, which generally uses a two-step verification method. It is done by sending OTP to the linked mobile number and email ID.
How Phone Verification Helps Reach Out to Customers
Digital abilities prove no less than a blessing for entrepreneurs. It helps them reach out to really interested customers quickly because they have their accounts authorised through their phone numbers. With that, brands or eCommerce companies route promotional offers or news with the motto of attracting customers.
And, a big thanks to phone numbers for making it way easier!
In the case of invalid numbers, various businesses cannot leverage their customer’s phone numbers. Certainly, the role of these numbers is crucial. A few mismatches or incorrect numbers can never let them access the company’s newsletter, offers, lucrative deals, new launches, and updates. These all appear in a key role in digital marketing. This disconnect can cause such a big loss of valuable time and resources that you hardly imagine.
One more reason is there that pushes to verify customers or business contact lists. It is to fight scams or frauds. A defaulter or fraudster avoids using real contact details. Being involved in vulnerability, they use fake numbers.
But, it does not mean that all real and active numbers are non-risky. They can be threatening and point at scams.
How Can You Verify a Phone Number?
It’s a technical process to find out how this authentication works. Typically, the company’s business listing carries thousands of clients’ phone numbers. To check its validity, the data or phone verification provider sends a one-time password (or OTP). It can be sent through a short message. If not possible, a “text to speech” message can be sent. Once received, the real users type the passcode in the given space.
This process is typically adopted for verifying bank, app, or official account details. This method helps in failing any malicious attempt to steal away sensitive credentials (like bank account number or CVV number/ password)
Besides, there are certain background and identity check executing companies that have corpus nexus. It helps them connect with the official database of people (which might be a government database) to examine and determine if they are correct.
But, you cannot call it a failsafe method to validate phone numbers. There are certain models or risk scores that can help in scanning suspicious numbers and calculating how risky that number would be. In this process, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools prove great help. They scan fraud patterns with the lightning-fast speed in the early stage.
Generally, such apps work this way.
The detection app uses a quick API request to send to receiver APIs a message for data scrapping. With it, it’s easy to analyse the authenticity of that number. For this purpose, a criterion is set, which includes the following metrics:
- Risk score (from low to high)
- Country of origin
- Original network
- Current network
If a customer’s current network differs from the registered network, it can be suspicious. But, you cannot be so sure because the person can be flying somewhere, and his phone might be on roaming. So, it is necessary to examine all aspects before concluding the result.
Benefits of Phone Verification
The benefits of doing KYC are similar to verifying customers’ contact details. Here are a few advantages associated with phone number authentication.
Such type of verification ensures a higher security level and also keeps everything crystal clear between the customers and the products or service providers.
However, some smart fraudsters bypass classical solutions for malicious attempts. They use a fake number, which is easily available online. They use it in place of their real one. Such cases are also normal wherein a person shares the number of his family or friends as a substitute. To determine such people, several apps and tools are available that automatically send a one-time passcode for authentication. These are all temporary passcodes that expire in 2 to 10 minutes mostly. Such tools allow companies to discover phone numbers that are actually original and belong to their actual user.
With such a system, various businesses or organizations stay assured that their information would reach the real user, saving money and resources. In short, it ensures that the marketing or sales target can be achieved in reality.
For keeping the risk of fraud at bay, phone number validation is valuable. It’s really effective in detecting patterns of fraud using fraud scoring tools. Fraudsters leverage loops in the security system for accessing sensitive information. It promotes online phishing and ransomware attempts, which leads to extortion.
With verified contact numbers, you can minimise such risks.
Luckily, there are some phone verification providers that use some really effective and efficient tools to automatically filter unreal or ghost numbers.
Recently, WhatsApp left half a billion users exposed to spammers. However, it was denied later. But somewhere, it’s clearly a threat to privacy and also, a big loss of customers that are the lifeblood of any business. These incidents create a need for phone number validation, which is actually a must-have if you really want to scale your reach, business, and opportunities.
Summary
Phone numbers help you reach out to authentic customers. It ensures that businesses find the real users’ details to share their marketing efforts like newsletters, offers, new launches, brand updates, etc. The verification provider sends an OTP to check if the contact is real. If it gets a positive response, it becomes an addition to the list of customers.
