Cape Town based mobile services company Panacea Mobile, has recently launched a new Number Validation tool that allows businesses to improve their SMS delivery rates by removing inactive numbers from their lists. The tool serves as a real-time vetting process for all businesses that collect contact data from their clients.
Developed by Panacea Mobile co-founder and CTO Donald Jackson, Number Validation allows users to upload a list of numbers that will then get checked by the mobile networks using HLR Lookup. The results will then return information about each number in the list including and most noticeably whether or not a number is still valid. There is significant value in this as any inactive numbers can then be removed from the list, and because it costs less than an SMS to validate a number, utilising the tool is well worth the few easy steps required to clean your company’s data and save on any unnecessary SMS costs.
The HLR Lookup is basically a function of SMS and will ping a mobile number to detect if it is reachable which ultimately offers better data quality for companies that have large databases. The motivation behind the tool was for Panacea to see businesses spend less money on terminating SMS Messages that would not deliver and as a result decrease their total mobile marketing costs.
Stefano Sessa, co-founder and owner explains that “Mobile databases age everyday and quite often we see our clients sending millions of messages, with a delivery rate of 60% or less. Although the service is not unique to Panacea Mobile, we noticed that no other South African companies in the space are offering their clients this service.”
While the technology has been around for some time already, the service offered as an easy to use online tool for consumers and businesses is a first for South Africa.
Users can also use the tool as often as they like which can be used by uploading a spreadsheet of numbers to Panacea’s online dashboard at any time.
“Mobile databases age daily”, says Sessa. “Any database older than six months should really be considered for cleaning so as to avoid the wasted cost of sending to inactive numbers.”
Panacea will be releasing API documentation soon and are particularly excited to see what developers can cook up when using real-time number validation in their applications.
For more information about the Number Validation tool click here.
