Imagine this: your company has an important update about a temporary service downtime you want to share with your customers. You broadcast a text message to all your customers based on phone number data sourced from the CRM system. You believe that everything is going fine during the downtime until your customer service team receives a complaint. This call is from a customer who has had to face a financial loss as he was unaware of the disruption. This is just the beginning of many calls where customers complain of unexpected service disruption. Probing further into the cause for miscommunication, you realize that several messages were not delivered to the intended customers because of outdated customer profile data, including their phone numbers.

According to research by Prove, 37 million phone numbers are recycled every year. Along with that, 126 million new phones are activated, and 70 million are lost every year! All these scenarios can result in dated personal identity attributes affecting the quality of customer service and satisfaction. These scenarios can be broadly categorized as:

• Number Changes: If an identity changes its phone number
  

• Disconnects: If an identity disconnects/gives up a phone number
  

• New Phone Numbers: Identities becoming associated with new numbers

Prove’s research study also shows that only half of the phone numbers in company databases are verified and up to date, thereby making it imperative companies leverage the right identity authentication solutions. Many companies worldwide are now choosing to tie their CRM system to phone intelligence solutions to ensure that phone numbers are at the center of identity verification and authentication and are continuously updated. 

With updated phone numbers through robust identity-based phone authentication solutions, companies are presented with a wide variety of opportunities to innovate and offer enhanced customer satisfaction:

The typical solution approach to addressing these problems is highly fragmented in an enterprise. However, with a single platform that satisfies many use cases, you could rationalize and streamline the enterprise solution landscape. You only need one solution across the enterprise.

Fonebook™ by Prove is an industry-leading solution in this segment. It is a phone-centric customer servicing solution that continuously manages one billion+ consumer and small business Identity tokens. Additionally, it processes billions of signals a year to deliver accurate phone number identification. Clients can enroll in Fonebook™ by binding their customer IDs to verified identity tokens (phone numbers). 

The Fonebook™ solution, when used with Prove’s identity verification and authentication APIs services such as Mobile Auth for frictionless 2FA, Instant Link for SMS-based 2FA, and Trust Score™, becomes the one-stop solution for identity authentication and customer servicing. The Fonebook™ solution and other APIs have been adopting the “PRO” model of identity authentication and verification based on the following three checks:

• Possession: Passively prove possession of the phone
• Reputation: Assess the real-time reputation of the phone (tenure and behavior)
• Ownership: Prove ownership of the phone line

From increasing PII data's recency leading to better customer experience to lowering fraud rates and OPEX, the benefits of phone-intelligence-based identity authentication solutions are multifold. With 70% of leading Fortune 100 companies now using phone numbers as the modern way for identifying and servicing customers, it has become critical that their identity data remains current.

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