June 13, 2017 at 11:54How do obsolete phone number bases “eat up” business money?
Today, a mobile phone is a key identifier, and the number of mobile devices has exceeded the world's population. This is the main way of communication with a person and the main channel for delivering information.
The customer contact database is used in any business, both for the purpose of sending important notifications (information about orders, bank card transactions, etc.) and for marketing. The database is an important company resource. But there is another side: the bases are in the habit of quickly becoming obsolete, and if they are not updated, then they bring losses instead of revenues.
Speaking about problems with databases, people primarily recall technical failures. However, it’s very simple to fix everything here: it’s enough to restore the data from the backup copy (do not you forget about backup?).
In addition to technical reasons, there are others related to the human factor. This is not only about database operator errors - although they happen - but more about the permanent loss of data relevance. It is important to remember that the database begins to lose relevance at the time of its creation. By the way, for this reason, the legendary Britannica encyclopedia has ceased to appear on paper. It turned out that it was outdated on the same day when it was printed, and the publishers preferred to switch to the electronic version.
Panta rhei (lat. - Everything flows, everything changes)
In an age of affordable mobile communications and intense competition between operators, numbers quickly become invalid: people change them, the operator transfers numbers to new owners. Often people lose their phones and cannot restore the number, as a result of which they have to connect a new one. Someone uses several SIM cards at once, changing them in the phone as necessary. Someone moves to another country, and someone just gives the wrong number during the survey.
A few such errors in the database are not so critical, but over time a real snowball builds up from them, and as a result, communication and marketing activities lose their effectiveness.
Maintaining the relevance of the database is not easy, especially to track whether the same person is using a particular number or has been transferred to a new owner. Nevertheless, there is a solution that allows you to quickly analyze the database for the validity / invalidness of numbers, identify ported numbers, inaccessible numbers and numbers in roaming. One simple operation will save your business from unnecessary expenses.
What expenses are we talking about? The most common situation is sending SMS notifications to inactive numbers. If the database is small - a couple of tens of thousands of numbers, the losses will be insignificant. However, medium and large businesses can lose quite small amounts from month to month.
Extra costs arise when the routing of calls and SMS messages is incorrect: this often happens when a subscriber changes his telecom operator while maintaining his old number.
In addition, losses can be expressed not only in money, but also in lost time: managers sometimes spend a lot of precious time making calls to inactive, inaccessible numbers or to roaming ones. It is worth mentioning that when making calls to numbers that are in roaming, the business actually encroaches on the balance of the subscriber who has to pay for the call. This will not make him happy either.
Our company provides the service Checking the number , which allows you to check the relevance of phone numbers around the world, and it is available both through your personal account and through the API. Inactive numbers can be excluded from the database to reduce costs, and in the analytics section you will find information about your database by country, operator and availability status.
From the experience of our clients, it can be said that some companies save tens of thousands of dollars every month by maintaining the base in good condition.
The customer contact database is used in any business, both for the purpose of sending important notifications (information about orders, bank card transactions, etc.) and for marketing. The database is an important company resource. But there is another side: the bases are in the habit of quickly becoming obsolete, and if they are not updated, then they bring losses instead of revenues.
How do databases go bad?
Speaking about problems with databases, people primarily recall technical failures. However, it’s very simple to fix everything here: it’s enough to restore the data from the backup copy (do not you forget about backup?).
In addition to technical reasons, there are others related to the human factor. This is not only about database operator errors - although they happen - but more about the permanent loss of data relevance. It is important to remember that the database begins to lose relevance at the time of its creation. By the way, for this reason, the legendary Britannica encyclopedia has ceased to appear on paper. It turned out that it was outdated on the same day when it was printed, and the publishers preferred to switch to the electronic version.
Panta rhei (lat. - Everything flows, everything changes)
In an age of affordable mobile communications and intense competition between operators, numbers quickly become invalid: people change them, the operator transfers numbers to new owners. Often people lose their phones and cannot restore the number, as a result of which they have to connect a new one. Someone uses several SIM cards at once, changing them in the phone as necessary. Someone moves to another country, and someone just gives the wrong number during the survey.
A few such errors in the database are not so critical, but over time a real snowball builds up from them, and as a result, communication and marketing activities lose their effectiveness.
What can be done in this situation?
Maintaining the relevance of the database is not easy, especially to track whether the same person is using a particular number or has been transferred to a new owner. Nevertheless, there is a solution that allows you to quickly analyze the database for the validity / invalidness of numbers, identify ported numbers, inaccessible numbers and numbers in roaming. One simple operation will save your business from unnecessary expenses.
What expenses are we talking about? The most common situation is sending SMS notifications to inactive numbers. If the database is small - a couple of tens of thousands of numbers, the losses will be insignificant. However, medium and large businesses can lose quite small amounts from month to month.
Extra costs arise when the routing of calls and SMS messages is incorrect: this often happens when a subscriber changes his telecom operator while maintaining his old number.
In addition, losses can be expressed not only in money, but also in lost time: managers sometimes spend a lot of precious time making calls to inactive, inaccessible numbers or to roaming ones. It is worth mentioning that when making calls to numbers that are in roaming, the business actually encroaches on the balance of the subscriber who has to pay for the call. This will not make him happy either.
Our company provides the service Checking the number , which allows you to check the relevance of phone numbers around the world, and it is available both through your personal account and through the API. Inactive numbers can be excluded from the database to reduce costs, and in the analytics section you will find information about your database by country, operator and availability status.
From the experience of our clients, it can be said that some companies save tens of thousands of dollars every month by maintaining the base in good condition.