Telerivet provides a web interface to Vonage's Number Insight API, which makes it easy to look up information about your contacts' phone numbers, including the type of phone number (mobile, landline, or VOIP), validity, mobile network, and country.
Number Insight is commonly used for finding invalid, landline, or VOIP phone numbers in your contact list, so you can clean your contact list before sending SMS broadcasts.
Configuring Number Insight
To configure Number Insight in your Telerivet account, you'll first need to register your own Vonage APIs account, so that you can pay Vonage to use this functionality. Vonage charges EUR 0.005 (approximately $0.0054) per successful phone number lookup. (For EUR 10, you could use Number Insight to look up information on 2,000 contacts.)
On your Services page, click Add Service, then select the Contact Enrichment category, and select Vonage Number Insight (or follow this link).
Running Number Insight
On your Contacts page, select any contacts to look up, then click Actions > Number Insight. Vonage's Number Insight API will fill in information about the selected contacts. The process may take some time, depending on the number of contacts selected.
Telerivet will update the Number Insight Status field for each contact:
- success - Number Insight completed successfully
- invalid - The phone number was invalid (Nexmo does not charge for this)
- processing - Nexmo is currently processing your request
- invalid_auth - Your Nexmo API parameters were incorrect
- busy - too many concurrent Nexmo API requests
- internal_error - An unexpected error occurred with Nexmo API
- insufficient_funds - Your Nexmo account does not have enough funds for the Number Insight request
In order to help you avoid accidentally paying to look up the same contact multiple times, Telerivet will skip any contacts that already have the status "success". If you actually want to look up a contact again, you can clear the Number Insight Status field for that contact.
Removing/Blocking Unwanted Phone Numbers
A common use of the Number Insight API is to remove invalid or unwanted phone numbers from your contact list before sending an SMS broadcast. However, the Number Insight service itself only fills in contact fields, and doesn't delete or block contacts.
After running Number Insight on your contact list, you can use the "Filters" function on the Contacts page to create a filter for unwanted contacts, such as "Number Insight Status is not success", or "Number Type is not mobile":
After creating a filter for the contacts you don't want, select all contacts in the filter, then either block the contacts via Actions > Block sending, remove them from a group via Groups... dialog, or permanently delete them via Actions > Delete contacts.