Smart use of IVR based Missed Call : Phone verification

What is Phone verification ?

Phone verification can be called verification of a phone number entered in a form ( both online form or offline paper form ) either it is a valid phone number or not. Here, validity of the phone number does not mean only about the numbers entered numeric, length of digits entered sufficient ( which can be verified by smart software though), but the phone number works! It mean, the number has to ring when dialed from another phone number. Also it has to match the owner of the phone number with the name entered in the form!

So, most of the time the only way to verify the number is to manually dial and speak to the person.

Why Phone verification is required ?

Phone verification is required for many services for obvious reasons to authenticate credential of a person. Credit card, Banking, ID proof etc. are few examples where phone verification is a must.

A verified phone may also reduce many unproductive calls by any tele-caller.

How Missed Call and IVR can be used ?

A missed call is a call when it is not picked by the caller. Now that missed call may happen when called party does not pick the call even when ringing is over, or when called party disconnects call after one or few rings. Depending on the type of missed call, few messages are exchanged between called party and the caller. In India as well as other countries too, missed call is widely used by people!

“Missed Call” are also known as ‘drop call’ in USA, ‘prank call’ in United Kingdom and Australia, beep in Africa etc.

The same “Missed Call” can also be used to verify a phone number automatically using the following method :-

1. When a person enters a phone number in any online registration form, he is given a phone number to dial from the phone number she entered in the form within a given time say next 20 mins. The pop up clearly mentions that as soon the phone rings, it will be disconnected just after capturing the Called ID and the call will not be charged!

2. The person calls the number. The IVR receiving the call will capture the Caller ID and match it with the number entered in the online form. If it matches, the phone number will be verified and the registration would be accepted.

3. The IVR can now make an outbound call to inform that the registration is accepted and now he can proceed with his registration or any other purpose of the online form submission.

Any PRI connection in India is normally given 100 numbers in continuity. So, these 100 numbers could be used in random to get missed calls from different users in order to increase secrecy as well as security.

So, missed call with an intelligent IVR system could be used as completely automated phone number verification service.

Tagged as: hosted ivr, Hosted IVR Service, Hosted Phone Verification, inbound IVR, ivr, outbound ivr, Phone Verificaion