Today, businesses are seeing more and more security breaches because of scammers and spammers. Unfortunately, the breaches can lead to poor customer experience, as well as affect your customer retention rate. Also, they can have a negative effect on your brand name, and lead to financial and legal repercussions. However, there’s one solution that can reduce the possibility of data breaches—phone validation.
What is phone validation?
Phone validation works the same as email validation. It helps you to check the authenticity of phone numbers. To do this, you will need to send a voice message or an SMS to your users, and then instruct them to input your message back. Here, the user is required to type the code into the application.
Now, when the user executes the instructions, it’s an indication that the user can access the phone number they provided. Therefore, businesses need to check the validity of phone numbers since phones have become the primary modes of communication for many people. Moreover, it helps businesses to identify the user.
One notable thing with phone validation is that it’s more reliable compared to email validation since it has better chances of doing away with fraudsters and spammers.
Why does your business need phone validation?
The importance of phone validation for businesses cannot be understated. Most businesses across the world have a challenge in keeping an up-to-date contact database. 77% of businesses believe that fake contact information leads to a negative effect on their income. This shows the importance of monitoring your contact database.
Phone validation tools, such as the phone validation tool by Byteplant ensure that the phone contacts in your database are real and accurate. This helps businesses to avoid wasting their resources texting or calling fake or fraudulent contacts. Eventually, this can save you lots of money since your business will be maximizing on its revenue opportunities, increase business performance, and boost customer experience.
The following are a few other reasons for phone validation.
Verify the validity of your consumers
With phone validation, you can easily verify the validity of your user before adding them to your contact list. Once you validate their identity, you can connect the phone number to the users, and this will create secure access for your users. Now, you can use the number to validate the identity of the user throughout the lifecycle of the account. You can do this at any stage of the customer process.
Prevent fraud
As highlighted above, phone validation is an effective tool for preventing fraud, as well as the creation of bulk accounts. Moreover, it gives you real-time security and also allows you to identify bots or spammers registering different bogus user accounts.
One major challenge most companies are facing today is the creation of fake user accounts, which add zero value to the business, and even drain the company resources. Moreover, these fake accounts can create chaos when they spam already validated user accounts.
Authenticating registration
When new users register for a certain program or application, validating their phone can assist you to authenticate their identity. This ensures that your new user is the person they are claiming to be. For instance, let’s say a new user downloads your app and registers their account with their phone. The user will get a PIN code through their preferred messaging service. Then, the user must enter this code into the app they want to register to complete the registration process. This step is essential, as it connects the user to their phone.
Resetting passwords
At times, a user will log into an application from a new device. Most of these devices have a different IP address from the device they registered their app with. This might prompt the user to request a password reset. Thus, sending a code helps in validating the identity of the user, which also helps in minimizing the chances for identity theft or fraud.
Refreshing your customer details
At times, your customer will change their profile information. When this happens, the customer’s number can be validated by sending a simple message to their active mobile device. This step helps businesses to validate the change.
Verifying that the owner has initiated such changes does not only help security-wise, it also ensures that you send accurate information to the user.
Authenticating transactions
By confirming transactions using real-time communications, your business reduces the costs associated with fraud resolution. Moreover, user verification via mobile phone validation is effective in minimizing suspicious activities. That’s the reason why most businesses require OTP (one-time-password) through SMS to authenticate online transactions. Your business shouldn’t be left behind too.
