Posts tagged ‘Web Service’
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.
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?
Why Cross Checking is Important When Using a Contact Validation Web Service
I have been working with web services for over 6 years now and have helped many companies both big and small to resolve their frustration with the online world of bogus lead chaos and bad affiliate programs.
With all of the information and services available to help validate your inbound leads you need to make sure that it is doing more than just a simple check for validity. There are a lot of Lead Validation services out there claiming that they are the best, but let’s really ask ourselves, what are they doing that is so unique? How will they really be able to assure you that they are catching your bad leads?
Good Question.
February 17, 2010 at 3:04 pm serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
Need to Verify Addresses? 5 Things to Look for in a Service Provider
Nearly every company doing business on the web today can benefit from performing simple validation and verification against the contact forms on their website. Each piece of customer contact data has the potential to hinder a company’s business processes if the information is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent. Perhaps the most key–and often most inaccurate–piece of information captured is the postal address.
Research shows that performing validation and verification on addresses can help businesses improve deliverability and shipments, reduce overhead spent following up on bad data, and reduce waste associated with Undeliverable Mail and over-production of direct mail pieces.
A quick search for Address Verification or Address Validation on a search engine like Google™ will yield pages of results for companies offering tools to validate and standardize postal addresses.
So how does a company seeking to improve communication with customers and reduce their direct mail waste, choose the right service provider?
Here are 5 important things to look for in an Address Verification or Address Validation service:
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February 10, 2010 at 10:11 am serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
Lead Validation ROI in Plain English: Save Thousands per Month; Get 5.8 days ROI
A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that when filling out web forms less than 40% of those surveyed provided accurate phone number and custom information—such as address—all of the time. The reality is most people are reluctant to give up their precious contact information when doing research or filling out requests for information. More often than not, the data is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent.
Where does this leave marketers, sales managers and lead generators? It leaves them sifting through mountains of contact data with the hope of isolating the true and valid leads that will bring more revenue to the bottom line. According to the Direct Marketing Association, 93% of marketers cite contact data quality as one of their most important issues.
Implementing a lead validation or verification solution is one way marketers and business managers can improve lead quality in real-time and at the source, and ultimately save money by shifting focus to high scoring leads, fixing questionable leads and discarding downright bad leads. 
Do the Math-
Here is a simple calculation showing where businesses save money by validating their leads:
Let’s say your business generates 100 leads per day or around 3,000 per month. 20% or 600 of those leads turn out to be bogus or bad leads. If your telesales team spends around 5 minutes per call and calls each lead an average of 3 times before qualifying and discarding bad leads, that is 15 minutes per lead. At $23/per hour that’s about $5.75 per lead—or $5.75 wasted on pursuing a lead that was ultimately determined to be bad. Multiply that by the estimated 600 bad leads per month and that’s $3,450 per month wasted telesales resources. Using a service like DOTS Lead Validation℠ will validate leads in real-time, before they arrive at telesales, and costs only about $.22 per lead or around $678/month for 3,000 transactions.
That is a savings of $2,772/month-with an ROI on the use of the Lead Validation solution in about 5.8 days.
In a nutshell, lead validation works by:
Validating whether the contact information is real. Is it a real address? Does 100 Main Street actually exist in the zip code provided?
Verifying that the contact name or business is associated or linked with the address, phone number and even IP Address provided.
Correcting address, city, state, and email elements as needed to make the lead data as complete as possible.
Scoring the lead based on the quality of data. Estimating the quality of data entails not only a check on data correctness as entered but quality as established through a method of proprietary checking and sophisticated cross correlation of supplied data with other data sources. An overall score is provided based on the quality of the pieces of contact information such as name, business name, email, IP address, phone number and street address. Recommending that you Accept, Reject or Review the lead.
Download our case study for more details on how DOTS Lead Validation can save your business money today!
Posted by Gretchen N.
Address Geocoding—a Big Tip for Delivery Businesses
All over the country businesses have popped up to bring quality sit-down restaurant meals into our homes. In the Pacific Northwest, Dinner Delivery Plus is one such business. Serving the Greater Eastside of Seattle area for the past 16 years, Dinner Delivery Plus offers the 400,000+ residents and businesses a variety of national and local restaurants with more than 80 choices. About 4 months ago, Dinner Delivery Plus decided to make some changes to their business model. Using DOTS Address Geocode℠ from Service Objects, they have redefined restaurant delivery in their market.
Delivery services, whether it be for restaurants, flowers, or groceries, often charge customers Delivery Fees on a Zone-based model. Zone-based models typically put the onus on the consumer to figure out how much their delivery charge will be by manually plotting their location on a map in relation to the business they are ordering from. To calculate a delivery fee the customer has to figure out which zone their desired restaurant is in and which zone their home or business is in, then they have to calculate the delivery based on a complicated grid or map. Some restaurant delivery services only offer consumers the option of choosing from restaurants within their specific zone. All in all, not the best customer experience—usually at a higher cost to the consumer.
Dinner Delivery Plus saw the opportunity to do things differently and to redefine their market. Their goal was to offer a better value and more restaurant choices to their customers. By employing distance based delivery pricing instead of Zone-based delivery, customers would pay a delivery fee based on the actual distance from the restaurant they were ordering from to their location.
Here is where address geocoding comes in. Using a real-time address geocoding web service, Dinner Delivery Plus is able to pinpoint the exact location of the customer when they register and input their address into the web form to place a delivery order. The geocoding service validates the address and determines the latitude and longitude coordinates. With this information Dinner Delivery Plus is able to tell the customer the exact delivery charge based on their distance from each of the 80 restaurants. Their website makes recommendations for restaurants that are the closest, but leaves it to the consumer to decide where they want to order from–creating a better customer experience.
Offering better value and a better customer experience drives more loyalty and ultimately more revenue. Address geocoding services can be a game-changer for businesses providing delivery as a service to their customers.
What are you doing in your business that is redefining your market?
Service Objects—the leading provider of real-time contact validation solutions—offers Address Geocoding for both the US and Canada.
Posted by: Gretchen N.
Tired of Returns: Santa Claus Resolves to Validate all Addresses in 2010
Every year Mr. Santa Claus faces enormous pressure to deliver billions of presents around the world. He has just one 
night—just one chance to ensure delivery of all the toys to children all over the globe. In recent years Claus has turned to technology to aid him in his annual quest. Said Claus, “While Rudolph’s nose may guide the sleigh, I still need all the help I can get. This year we received a lot of returned packages and gifts – mostly from incomplete or incorrect addresses. While maps and on-board computers lend a hand on the sleigh we just don’t have all the information we need.” Looking for answers and new tools for 2010, Claus began his search for something to help him verify addresses for his deliveries.
Luckily for Claus he found a real-time web service which offers Delivery Point Validation, CASS/USPS Address Standardization, and even RDI (Residential Delivery Indicator) for all the addresses on his “Nice” list. By using DOTS Address Validation by Service Objects, Clause estimates he will increase his delivery efficiencies by 40% and dramatically reduce the number of toys which need to be returned to the North Pole each year. When asked about his new services Claus could barely contain his excitement. Old Saint Nick stated “Now with Service Objects’ web services I will be able to almost guarantee that all the presents will be delivered. Not only will the addresses be validated and entered into my on-board computer in real-time, but the reindeer will know if they will be landing on a residence or business thanks to the new RDI filter.”
The North Pole is now giddy with excitement over the implementation of their Address Validation Web Services. In addition to Santa being more efficient on the big night, his elves will also not have to collect, sort, and re-stock returned toys like they have in the past. Santa added, “My workshop costs are going to go down and I can reinvest that money into developing new toys and hiring more elves. In other words, Christmas came early for me this year. This is one new year’s resolution I know will stick!”
How have you resolved to improve your business efficiencies in 2010?
Posted by: Will E.
Service Objects and Asterisk, Together at Last!
As a new member of the Service Objects team, I have learned an amazing amount in the last four months. I came on to help Service Objects with System Administrator duties, and there have been many interesting projects for me to work on from simple help desk tasks to installing new production server equipment to improve our customer’s experiences.
One of my favorite tasks has been configuring our new phone system. When I started here at Service Objects we were using an old analog system that, although operational, was starting to show its age. I promptly got started on a new open source platform called Asterisk, which has made us much more digital. Although we still retain our analog lines for incoming calls, we are now able to use our Internet connection to receive calls as well, ensuring that we are always available to our customers.
Many people here at Service Objects have been a part of this project, with Rachael and Marissa helping with the logic and recording the IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Alen and Geoff testing the hardware, Alex helping with some needed programming, and everyone else by providing feedback on how calls are working and sounding.
As a result of our experience with Asterisk, Service Objects is now exploring a whole new family of telephone verification tools. For example, our developers are already creating new DOTS Telephone Verification services to decrease the number of fraudulent transactions for our customers.
Moving forward I am excited to expand our Asterisk footprint beyond our in-house systems. Hopefully my experience with Asterisk will help our customers verify telephone numbers seamlessly – and in real-time – directly through our DOTS Web Service framework.
Thanks for reading this week!
Curtis J.
Ever Heard of the Idiom “You Get What you Pay For”?
With our new service DOTS GeoPhone Plus, you get what you pay for, and you only pay for what you get.
Sound confusing?
DOTS GeoPhone Plus is our new token based Web Service; you are only charged for a certain number of tokens based upon the quality of the returned data.
DOTS GeoPhone Plus offers its users the unique ability to verify, correct, and enhance customer contact data in real-time, with support for multiple line types in a single search interface. With Service Objects‘ exclusive cascading logic techniques, we are able to provide cost effective matching for DOTS GeoPhone Plus. If we don’t find any records matching the telephone number that you provided, then you don’t pay for that transaction.
So you get what you pay for, and you only pay for what you get.
Please feel free to contact us today to get additional information, or follow this link to sign up for a Free 15 Day Trial Key of DOTS GeoPhone Plus.
Have a great day!
Ericka J.
Phone Validation Made Simple
Businesses know Phone Validation makes business sense, but how do you use it to your best advantage?
There are several things to consider when trying to validate a telephone number, and in this blog we have broken down the process for you step-by-step. There are many ways to validate a telephone number, and many variables within the number to validate:
- Is the telephone number valid?
- Is the telephone number a landline, wireless, or VoIP?
- Is the telephone number disconnected or not valid (e.g. area code 999 does not exist)?
Service Objects offers the following telephone validation options:
- A multi-database Web service designed to provide the most accurate lookup of landline telephone numbers available
- Updated daily
- 72% match rate for consumers, 63% match rate for businesses
- Coverage for the US and Canada
- Point-of-entry validation
- Instantly recognizes if a telephone number is valid and acceptable by verifying the first seven digits of the number
- Returns line type (landline, wireless, or VoIP)
- Telephone data compiled from over 2,600 US and Canadian telephone service providers
- Returns telephone service provider information (carrier, city, state, latitude, longitude)
- Reverse-lookup of residential, business, and government telephone numbers
- Comprised of daily feeds from over 2,600 telephone companies across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico
- Over 190 million telephone listings
- Dynamic access to a variety of public, private, and proprietary telephone data
- Determines contact name and address
- Determines telephone type (business or residential)
- Determines line type (landline, wireless, or VoIP)
- Combines 3 of our powerful DOTS telephone validation services (DOTS GeoPhone, DOTS GeoPhone Wireless, and DOTS Phone Append)
- Compares a 10-digit telephone number to our database powerhouse of over 300 million records
- Determines contact name and address
- Determines telephone type (business, residential, Government)
- Determines line type (landline, wireless, VoIP, or toll free)
- Returns telephone service provider information (carrier, city, state, latitude, longitude)
I hope that I have helped in answering your telephone validation questions.
Thanks,
Ryan M.
