Phone Number Verification API

Availability

Phone Number Verification standard API available globally
Phone Number Verification premium API available in the U.S. only

Market Dynamics

The shift in mobile as a main channel of communication has provided a wide variety of use cases for companies to interact with their customers. From promotional alerts to increase share of wallet, to transaction and service alerts to create transparency throughout each customer’s unique journey; there are several ways that brands can utilize mobile to enhance the customer experience.

Overview

With the increased adoption of mobile communication in the B2C segment, regulators in the U.S. have mandated that companies protect consumer privacy. In particular, The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the U.S. has outlined a set of regulations that companies must adhere to. The regulation lays out the need to gain consumer’s explicit written consent before sending voice or text messages, and the need to ensure that phone numbers stored in their database have not been reassigned to other users after the original opt-in date.

Syniverse Phone Number Verification API proactively notifies companies when a phone number has an event change within their particular database (i.e. a phone number being disconnected or switched to another network provider). The service enables companies to categorize database contacts into a “do-not-call” list and flag phone numbers with relevant event changes as “new consent required." This enables companies to mitigate regulatory risk by building the service into their decision-making process before reaching out to consumers. The solution is not intrusive as obtaining this phone number information does not require consent from the end-consumer.

Use Cases

Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) Risk Mitigation: As outlined above, TCPA in the U.S. has put forth a set of regulations that companies must adhere to including gaining consumer’s explicit written consent before sending voice or text messages, and ensuring that phone number reassignment has not occurred after a customer's opt-in date. For example, if Syniverse Phone Number Verification API identifies that a number has been deactivated and then ported to another carrier family, the company can keep the number in its calling database. However, if a number has been deactivated and is not followed by a porting event to another carrier family (inter-carrier/competitive port), the company should categorize these numbers in its “do-not-call” database until new consent has been obtained via another channel.

Message Routing Improvement: Enterprises can use the globally available Standard Phone Number Verification Service API to ensure proper routing of text messages to the consumer by confirming carrier name, mobile network code, number type and phone number validity.

Service Description

The purpose of this application is to look up phone numbers and return a response (or phone number event change) via the API. The requester can enter a single-number or a batch file of phone numbers for look-up and determine a defined endpoint where the file should be retrieved. For batch file processing, the file has to be submitted in .txt format and in E.164 standard (+12122223333).

For detailed API documentation on the phone number look up, visit this link.

Phone number monitoring will notify you of phone number event changes, such as number porting, using the Event Manager API.

Disconnected Phone Numbers

When a phone number is disconnected, then the monitoring will automatically be discontinued. If you need to continue to monitor a phone number after disconnection, then this can be enabled by the Syniverse team by contacting Syniverse Sales

A monthly report containing a list of disconnected phone numbers is also automatically generated on the 1st day of the following month.

This is stored, and can be downloaded from, the Media Storage Service (MSS). To receive a notification when the report is ready for download, including the uri to download the file, then subscribe to the MSS-events topic. Setting up subscriptions is described in the Event Manager user guide. An example notification is also included in the Event Manager Examples page.

Access

Single-number look-up: Number can be entered directly in the API call .
Bulk file look-up: File needs to be formatted in txt format and in E.164 standard (+12122223333).
Monitoring: Access via Event Manager Service (see Related Services)

For enterprise pricing and post-paid account registration, please contact Syniverse Sales.

If you use single-number look-up, only Syniverse Developer Community Service is used.

For the bulk file look-up, the following other services are used:

For the monitoring subscription, the following related services are required: