Real-Time vs. Batch Phone Validation: Which Do You Need?

Having accurate phone numbers is key to effective business communication. You might be making sales calls to prospects, marketing your product or service via SMS campaigns, or updating customers on their orders. Using correct numbers in these various scenarios increases the likelihood of messages being received.

When numbers are invalid, inactive, or mistyped, the consequences can be costly for a business. You’ll face expenses from bounced SMS messages and wasted marketing dollars, angry customers, and even a compliance risk if you use a number that shouldn’t be contacted!

To eliminate these issues, businesses can use phone validation, which ensures any numbers in your database are accurate, active, and usable. There are various ways to validate a phone number, but two common methods are real-time verification and batch verification.

This blog will discuss each of the methods in detail, the benefits of real-time vs batch validation processing methods, and how to determine which will suit your business’s needs, or if both will work!

What is Phone Validation?

Phone validation involves confirming that a phone number is real, active, and can receive calls and messages. Phone validation ensures that your contact list is verified and clean, instead of relying on raw data that can include fake numbers, invalid, and/or outdated numbers.

It is a crucial step before using numbers for sales, marketing, or communication with your customers. If you do not validate numbers, your business risks wasting SMS and calling costs, getting poor results from campaigns, and may even violating compliance regulations.

A good phone validation tool does much more than confirm that a phone number exists. It may be able to:

• Validate the format – ensure the number is formatted in accordance with the rules for the country
• Validate the carrier status – identify mobile network provider, valid numbers and whether the phone number is live
• Validate the line type – comprises mobile, landline, VoIP – fixed or non-fixed lines, and the like

Validate activity – filter out inactive or unreachable subscribers.

What is Real-Time Phone Validation?

Real-time phone validation is the process of instantly verifying phone numbers for accuracy, validity, and active status at the moment customers enter them into online forms, CRM systems, or user sign-up flows. This means ensuring that you only receive accurate phone numbers that are functional, and minimize the errors at the point of entry.

How It Works

Real-time phone validation uses an API integration to check the validity of a phone number at the moment it is submitted. The API connects to a database or service that checks if a phone number is active, properly formatted, and if it includes a real carrier.

This happens in milliseconds and enables real-time feedback. When a fake, mistyped, or even invalid entry is caught at the point of entry, real-time phone validation prevents low quality data from being captured in your system.

Ideal Use Cases of Real-Time Phone Validation

Real-time phone validation is best for businesses that need to capture correct data when the data at the point of
collection, preventing errors from entering their system. Below are key instances when this validation should occur:

1. Online signups and lead generation forms

   No matter how users are signing up, whether for newsletters, requesting a demo, or starting a free trial, they will be entering a phone number. Validating it in real-time ensures you capture only good numbers. This leads to fewer follow-up failures, as your sales and marketing teams can rely on being able to reach them.

2. E-commerce checkout pages

   Once again, you’re going to ask for a customer’s phone number to confirm their order, track their shipment, or to manage customer support. Real-time validation prevents typos and fake phone numbers at the point of purchase. This improves the customer experience for their order, advertises to them, and improves your chances of a successful sale and delivery.

3. Customer onboarding account creation or service registration

   When a new user creates an account or registers for a service, you want to make sure you can contact them for key notifications, onboarding help, or verification messages to build trust and reliability from day one. Validating their phone number immediately provides an opportunity to make sure that they can be reached.

4. CRM data entry by sales teams

   Selling teams manually enter numbers when they’re adding data from a call, meeting, or form. Real-time validation stops the initial errors or typos from being added to your CRM to limit the number of duplicates and bad phone numbers entering your CRM so your sales pipeline remains clean.

What is  Batch Phone Validation?

Batch phone validation is the process of validating phone numbers in bulk. Rather than validate a single number at a time, businesses can upload whole databases or contact lists and validate them all at once. This method is useful for businesses and organizations who already have large datasets and want to clean them before using to launch campaigns or migrate data.

How It Works

With batch validation, the process begins by uploading a file. Typically, a CSV or Excel document that contains all the phone numbers you want to validate. Some providers can directly connect to your CRM or marketing automation system so that you can schedule your automated bulk validation checks without having to remember to manually upload the file.

After your file has been submitted for validation, the validation solution will process each number in your list. But the validation doesn’t just stop at answering whether a number exists or not. It will go further to:

1. Verify the number’s formatting is indeed valid for the country.
2. Determine the carrier and whether the number is associated with a legitimate network.
3. Identify the line type (mobile, landline, VoIP, toll-free).
4. Identify whether or not there is an active and reachable line.

At the end of processing, you will usually be provided a report or cleaned file that categorizes your numbers (valid, invalid, risky, or a DNC listing). This allows you to easily update your file, eliminate bad numbers, and only have reachable contacts moving forward.

As the process is 100% automated and is processing an entire list, batch validation is ideal for cleaning contacts in bulk for your database, preparing a list of contacts for a marketing campaign, and performing ongoing data hygiene.

Ideal Use Cases of Batch Phone Validation

Batch validation should benefit any organization that processes numerous contacts, as it ensures outreach is both effective and compliant with various mandated requirements. Some common use cases for batch validation include:

1. Marketing campaigns with large contact lists

   Before sending an SMS or calling thousands of other contacts, batch validation is a valuable first step to filtering out inactive, unreachable or invalid numbers. This ensures the marketing efforts reach a real, responsive customer instead of someone who inadvertently ended up on the list. This will increase engagement rates and reduce wasted marketing spend.

2. CRM projects or data migration projects

   Whenever transferring customers or other contacts from one system to another for migration (service-related or a data cleanse or normalization project), batch validation is an effective way to ensure only accurate and verified phone numbers reliably transfered over to the next system. This limits legacy problems from moving to the new CRM and ensures all sales and marketing contributions are working from clean and legitimate data.

3. Hygiene checks on a periodic basis for a contact or data list

   Even over time, a contact list becomes outdated due to number changes, business closures, and human error, leading to inactive lines. Admittedly, many businesses do not schedule out periodic batch validation as part of their hygiene program.

However, when they do, it’s a simple and efficient way to maintain a clean database. This process improves overall data quality by removing invalid phone numbers, reduces compliance risks, and establishes operational efficiencies through the use of validated data.

Which Do You Need?

Choosing between real-time and batch phone validation depends on your business priorities and data workflow.

If your priority is to stop bad data from entering your system → go with real-time validation.

If your primary objective is to stop invalid, mistyped, or fake numbers from entering your database, then real-time validation is the way to go. With validating numbers at the point of entry and not just the type of entry (in all forms, signups, and whatever entry process you use for your CRM) you can ensure you have quality data from day one, which will reduce post-entry issues, wasted marketing spend, and compliance risks related to bad data.

If your priority is to clean and maintain existing and large datasets → go with batch validation.

If your focus is to improve data quality within an extensive existing database or contact list, batch validation is your best solution. Drone them all, batch validation scans tens of thousands, if not millions, of numbers, filters out inactive, unreachable, or risky contacts, and lets you build a clean, usable dataset to run marketing campaigns, communicate at scale, or configure a CRM properly.

Many businesses find success with a hybrid model (real-time for new data + batch for continuity of hygiene)

Many companies succeed with a hybrid approach, real-time validation for new data entries to stop bad data entering, and batch validation for cleaning existing databases to maintain long-term data integrity. This strategy enhances operational efficiency and maximizes the marketing and communicating to customers.

Conclusion:

Accurate phone data is vital for reaching customers, lowering costs, and maintaining compliance. Real-time validation prevents bad numbers from entering your database, while batch validation cleans and maintains your existing database.

The best practice is to do both, and that’s what Landline Remover does. You can rest assured that your list is accurate and ready for a campaign.

It’s time to clean your contact lists with Landline Remover, sign up now for free validations and see the difference for yourself!