Archive for March, 2010
Reverse Phone Lookup: Token-Based Pricing Helps You Keep Your “Pot of Gold”
What do St. Patrick’s Day and a reverse phone lookup service have in common?
If the reverse phone lookup service is GeoPhone Plus from Service Objects, the answer is: a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 
An advanced reverse phone lookup service, like GeoPhone Plus, gives you the ability to identify detailed contact information for landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free numbers for both residences and businesses – all from a supplied phone number.
This is a great solution but where GeoPhone also excels is its pricing model.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
For example:
A major grocery retailer is using GeoPhone Plus to perform reverse phone lookup on phone numbers provided by their customers. They use the detailed contact data (name, address, etc) to have a better idea of where their customers are coming from to help make decisions about targeted marketing efforts and potential locations for future stores. Each time their software service requests information on a specific phone number, GeoPhone Plus hits multiple data sources to find detailed contact information for that phone number. GeoPhone Plus returns contact information on all types of phone numbers such as landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free. The type and level of contact data available varies depending on the type of phone number.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
Contact us for more information on GeoPhone Plus and token-based pricing.
Add comment March 17, 2010
Businesses Gain Marketing and Customer Insight by Appending Contact Info to Phone Numbers
You can learn a lot from a phone number. On my home phone, my caller ID let’s me know who is calling: my Best Friend or the National Survey Calling Center? With this info, I can make a split-second decision on what to do. To answer or not to answer.
For businesses, the customer’s phone number offers a different sort of intelligence. And I am not talking about your mom’s caller ID. Reverse Phone Lookup Services like DOTS GeoPhone Plus offer businesses critical data regarding customers and prospective customers. With a service like this, a phone number can provide a business with the following information:
- Residence or Business
- Residential Contact or Business Name
- Associated Address
- Telephone Provider Info (Carrier, City, State and Latitude and Longitude)
- Line type (wireless, landline, VOIP or toll free)
So what can a business do with this data? Here are just a few examples of how some of our customers are using this information:
Online Retailer
Use phone number and appended information to track potentially fraudulent transactions by comparing the appended information with the user-entered address information.
Phone/Mail Order Catalog Call Center
Auto-populating CRM and Contact Center databases: Auto-populating customer contact data reduces the chance of human error and typos while increasing the efficiencies of call center operators.
Laser Eye Surgery Center
Analyzing address and location data to determine future marketing and media spend. Having this detailed information about callers allows marketers to know where their customers and prospects are coming from to determine where to put their money for direct marketing campaigns, tv, etc.
National Grocery Chain
By collecting customer phone numbers at Check-Out, national grocery chains gain valuable insight on a store-by-store basis regarding where their customers are coming from. This helps to inform decisions about future store locations as well as targeted marketing campaigns.
How would having this level of contact information improve your business operations?
1 comment March 11, 2010
Why Google Maps Isn’t a Good Substitute for Address Validation
What is the difference between Address Validation and Google Maps?
Deliverability, deliverability, deliverability. Okay, there are a few others, but that’s the big one. Just because Google Maps places a marker on a map when you input an address, does not mean that you can deliver mail there, nor that a property even exists at that marker.
Take the following “address”:
4130 Calle Real
Santa Barbara, CA 93110
As you can see, Google Maps says this is a valid address and puts its marker next to an empty field with no buildings. As you’d expect this is not a deliverable address and will be returned to sender.
The reason for this discrepancy is that Google Maps is not an Address Validator, it is a Geolocation Estimator that uses addresses to aid in its estimation.
Imagine two people each holding a ruler with the numbers 1 – 12 printed on it. One of them is blind-folded. If they were asked to point to the number “6″, how would each one go about it?
The one who could see all the numbers would just find the 6 and point to it. The one who was blind-folded would probably guess that 6 was printed right in the middle of the ruler and point there.
But what if the ruler was missing the number “6″? Well, the person who could see all the numbers would state that the number was invalid, and the blindfolded person would point to an empty space in the middle of the ruler.
Google is blindfolded. They know street names, and the numbers on the endpoints, but very little about the numbers in-between. Often they assume a continuous and evenly-spaced number line and point to where they’d guess your number is.
Admittedly, this is an extreme example. But what it demonstrates primarily is that Google Maps does not have a strong knowledge of valid primary numbers within street segments and therefore cannot be used to determine deliverability of an address. The only thing that can reliably determine deliverability is a CASS-Certified Address Validation Engine that can match an address against the USPS database of valid addresses.
Posted: by Donnie K.
1 comment March 3, 2010
