Phone Number Lookups

Phone Number Lookups is a feature that's now available within the Blackthorn Messaging application. In this article, you'll learn what a Phone Number Lookup is and why it's important to your business. You will also find links to other helpful articles that explain the technical how-tos of this new feature and provide you with some example use cases.

What is a Phone Number Lookup?

A phone number lookup is a process where, given a phone number, we can identify the number's carrier (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, etc) and the type of phone it is (landline, mobile, or VoIP). A lookup can also identify a Bad Number which is a badly formatted number or one that does not exist.

When a phone number is looked up using this feature, the phone number information is stored in your Salesforce org for use in other areas of the Messaging application.

What are the benefits of Phone Number Lookups?

Save money. When you send an SMS the carrier will attempt to deliver that message even if the recipient's phone number is a landline. This still results in the message being deducted from your Messaging account balance. The problem, however, is that the message will not reach anyone so you have unnecessarily wasted messages from your balance, and that costs money. Messaging has new built-in features that help you utilize your phone number lookup data to prevent unnecessarily sending messages to landlines and bad numbers.

Validate user input. You most likely create phone number data in Salesforce using a number of sources and methods. For example, you may collect data through forms on your website, third-party integrations, and/or from your Salesforce users manually entering phone numbers. You end up with a lot of phone numbers in your org, but you don't really have insight into the type of phone and whether it is a landline, mobile, or just some non-existent phone number that someone typed in. Messaging now has built-in automations that allow you to instantly look up a phone number using the Process Builder.