A phone number is more than just a way to contact someone: with the proper tools, it can be a gateway to a rich set of information that can power your marketing, customer service, fraud prevention, or compliance efforts. We have two powerful products that let you choose the right level of capabilities – and costs – for making the most out of your telephone contact data assets.

Both of these products are based around reverse phone lookup: you give us a phone number and we will tell you everything we know about it. This blog explains the differences between these two products, together with some sample use cases.

Comparing your reverse phone lookup options

Our two products for reverse lookup and data verification for phone numbers are DOTS GeoPhone and DOTS GeoPhone Plus. Here is a quick summary of their capabilities:

• GeoPhone is a low-cost, basic reverse lookup product that provides the carrier, line type and provider latitude/longitude information for a given phone number, along with contact information for non-wireless phones, using a continuously updated database with over 230 million residential numbers and 40 million business listings.
• GeoPhone Plus adds a wealth of additional information about phone numbers from an expanded database of over 400 million US and Canadian numbers, including 170 million wireless numbers:
  • Contact information for all phone number types, including wireless numbers
  • Latitude and longitude information for contact addresses
  • SIC business categorization for business numbers
  • SMS/MMS address information for wireless numbers
  • Whether a number has been ported, including date ported

The basic GeoPhone product gives you the power to validate phone numbers and gain greater insight about your customers and prospects, while GeoPhone Plus adds deeper contact information, including mobile data, business intelligence and compliance data from an expanded data set. Let’s look at how you can put each of these products to use.

Sample use cases

Some of the applications for our basic GeoPhone capabilities include:

Validation. Verify landline and business numbers for legitimacy and accuracy.

Geotargeting. Use provider latitude and longitude data to learn more about where your customers and prospects may be located.

Market segmentation. Create custom business logic for residential, business or government phone numbers.

Basic GeoPhone is often a cost-effective choice for doing contact data validation with businesses, which still largely use either landline or voice over IP (VoIP) numbers.

GeoPhone Plus adds the data you need for important applications such as:

Fraud prevention. Check phone numbers against other order data, and flag the possible use of fraudulent or “burner” phone numbers from orders using stolen credit data.

TCPA compliance. The expanded wireless number information from GeoPhone Plus, including porting dates and information, let you know if your phone contacts have changed hands or been ported to wireless phones – helping you avoid potentially strict penalties for marketing to wireless phones under the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Gathering expanded contact information. Get full contact information from your wireless, landline and VoIP phone data, allowing you to validate these numbers against your existing contact database. SMS and MMS gateway information also gives you the ability to port email contacts to text messages on wireless phones.

Improved market targeting. SIC code and geolocation data give you the ability to more finely tune your telephone-based marketing efforts to the right kinds of businesses.

Pro tip: GeoPhone Plus also gives the ability to control your costs by choosing the level of output data it returns, ranging from Basic level with landline, toll-free and carrier data to the Full level including all wireless and contact data. Our extensive developer guide can give you more specific details.

Try our reverse phone lookup products for free

It is very easy to discover the power of GeoPhone and GeoPhone Plus for your own business applications. Our product web pages linked above let you try these capabilities live with sample numbers, and see for yourself what kinds of outputs they return. And for a deeper dive, you can request a free trial key good for 500 of your own transactions – which lets you implement and test these capabilities on our nickel.

Have more questions? Our friendly technical staff are ready to assist you any time. Let us help you explore how to get the most out of your telephone contact data assets.