Having extra information about phone numbers can be invaluable to a business for several reasons. It can help fight fraud, support TCPA compliance and give an extra boost in insight about how and when to best contact the customers using their provided phone number.

Our DOTS Phone Exchange 2 is designed to validate phone numbers with the kind of detailed results that gives businesses an edge over their competition. The beauty of our Phone Exchange 2 product is that it can validate both domestic and international phone numbers, so no matter where your phone data is coming from, we help provide the intelligence your business needs to get ahead and communicate more effectively with clients.

Which operation to use

We have two separate operations in our Phone Exchange 2 service. We recommend using them both to get the most insight into your data. Here is a brief description of each of them:

GetExchangeInfo – Takes a 10-digit phone number and returns the line type, carrier information, ported information and more. This operation can validate US and Canadian phone numbers.

GetInternationalExchangeInfo – Takes a phone number and the country associated with the phone number as input, and returns carrier information, line type, a flag that indicates its validity and more. This operation can validate any phone number from around the world.

If you have US or Canadian phone numbers we recommend using the GetExchangeInfo operation, as that can provide ported information for the phone number as well as more detailed output data compared with the GetInternationalExchangeInfo operation.

As with most of our APIs, these operations can be processed in one-time batches, one-off lookups, automated batches and real time API integration.

Key output fields

There are many output fields in our Phone Exchange 2 service. First let’s look at some outputs that overlap between the two operations, that our clients have found particularly valuable:

Name – Provides the name of the phone carrier that this phone number is associated with.

Location, Latitude/Longitude – This is the location where the phone number was registered; it is important to note that this is not the location of the phone or the phone contact number.

Line Type – The line type for a phone number, which can be valuable for several reasons. Many organizations have different protocols that will be followed if a number is wireless versus landline. Landline numbers can also give a higher probability that phone number is in the location provided, while wireless numbers can receive text messages.

Time Zone – This is another field that can assist in determining an appropriate time to contact clients by their phone number. This value is based off of the carrier location.

Finally, here are two popular outputs that are specific to the GetInternationalExchaneInfo operation:

IsValid – A simple true/false flag that indicates whether the phone number is valid.

IsValidForRegion – A true/false flag that indicates whether the phone number is valid for the given country in the input. I.E. if a US number is given to the service with the Country value of “Germany” the service will return false for this field.

Using countries and calling codes

GetInternationalExchangeInfo does quite a lot to determine which country the given phone number is associated with – which is good news! Dealing with calling codes, parsing phone number lengths, and determining the best fit country for a phone number can be tough work. We’ve done all of the leg work and put a lot of thought into how our international operation determines the validity of the phone number.

The two important pieces to parsing an international phone number are the country code and the country provided in the input. This service uses both of these to parse and determine the best country.

The service will look for a country code at the beginning of a phone number and will give precedence to numbers in front of a “+” sign, which is a standard way of writing an international phone number. If no country code is given it will use the given country information to determine the validity of the phone number.
If both a country code is given with a “+” sign and a country is given in the input, the service will generally use the country code as the country identifier.

Conclusion

As with any of our services, we are always happy to make recommendations about your specific use case. Don’t hesitate to reach out to our integration specialists here at Service Objects, and we will be glad to make recommendations on how to get the most out of DOTS Phone Exchange 2 or any other service.