[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] RingsTrue: Smarter phone numbers in Salesforce

This week's new post is dedicated to a new AppExchange app, meant to help us in one of the most difficult and annoying tasks on every CRM: phone number validation.

Thanks to our week's guest blogger Iain Clements.

Iain runs Cloud Ursa Ltd, a registered Salesforce partner based in the UK. In addition to helping customers configure Salesforce, we also make RingsTrue.

XConnect is a world renowned telecommunications routing specialist that provides the world’s leading global telephone number data and phone intelligence services. XConnect combines trusted information from hundreds of disparate global data sets and enables our customers to build the best communication services and applications using our unified data via simple, secure, scalable and real-time interfaces.

Managing data quality in Salesforce can be time-consuming.

Making sure that your customer records have correct telephone numbers is an endless task. However, authentic numbers lead to less failed call backs and lower contact centre costs. If that phone number belongs to a new potential customer, getting the right data also improves your business.

Can’t I just fix them with regular expressions?

Not easily! Unlike other global numbering schemes (eg IP addressing), Telephone Numbers have evolved organically, (and not necessarily logically). Using Regular Expressions (REGEX) means creating a set of rules, to take a string of information and ‘reformat’ that information into something else.

But what are these rules for Telephone Numbers?

• Is the number in national or international format?
• Does it include the national dialling code (eg 0)?
• Does it include a country code ? How many digits is that country code?
• Is the country code valid?
• Does the remaining number have the correct number of digits for that country code ?
• Is the National number prefix valid for that country?

So what’s the answer?

Well, we’re biased of course but we think our app RingsTrue is a huge time saver for this work.

RingsTrue powered by Xconnect brings a wide range of number checking functionality to your Salesforce environment and tells you if your telephone numbers are authentic or not. It’ll do the heavy lifting of formatting, validating, and actively testing the telephone number for every contact in your database.

Using RingsTrue, powered by XConnect, you will be able to:

• Identify which telephone numbers in your CRM are Authentic and whether an authentic telephone number is a mobile number, fixed line number, or some other telephone number type.
• Check which of the authentic telephone numbers is known to be In-Service with telecommunications provider.
• Discover additional information about the capabilities and services supported by the end-uses devices, as well additional data made available by the mobile service provider.

How do I install it?

1. Go to the Appexchange
2. Click on Get It Now
3. Choose to install in your test environment or your live environment
4. When installed, go to the RingsTrue homepage and either click 'Run' or choose a schedule of phone checking to suit your company
5. When RingsTrue has checked all of your records you will see clearly what the current status of that number is

Where can I try it out?

Try it for free for 5 days with no obligation, click here to start now!