Next Call Club Boosts Quote Rates and Cleans Lead Lists with Real Contact API
Overview
Next Call Club, a managed lead aggregation service for insurance agents, reduced bad and disconnected phone numbers in their lead flow from 10-20% down to ~3% using Real Contact API. The team faced a persistent industry problem. A meaningful share of phone numbers on internet leads were disconnected, mislabeled, or otherwise unreachable, wasting their insurance agent customers’ time, eroding contact and quote rates, and making it harder to hold lead publishers accountable.
With Real Contact API powering identity, phone, email, and address verification across every lead, Next Call Club now grades leads before they ever reach an agent, curates their publisher mix based on performance data, and delivers a cleaner and more profitable marketplace to both sides of their business.
The Challenge
Next Call Club sits between insurance agents and lead publishers, running a managed marketplace designed to help agents buy leads in a smarter, more profitable way. However, it’s not uncommon for the average insurance agent buying internet leads to see anywhere from 10-20% of their phone numbers come back wrong or disconnected. Every one of those bad numbers wastes rep time, erodes confidence in the lead source, and drags down operational efficiency for both the agent and the marketplace.
On top of disconnected and invalid phone numbers, the team encountered other various data quality issues. Without a reliable way to verify identity, phone activity, and address data at scale, Next Call Club had no consistent method to catch fraudulent or wasteful leads before passing them through to their agents. They also had no signal to share back with vendors to help them clean up their own affiliate traffic.
The Solution
Next Call Club integrated Real Contact API to run every lead through a quality check before it ever reaches an insurance agent. Real Contact API verifies identity, phone, email, and address data in real time and returns contact grades (A-F) that Next Call Club uses to filter their incoming lead flow.
Based on early testing, the team set a clear threshold that, by default, only Grade-A and B leads move through to agents. Grade-A leads showed quote rates in the 20-22% range, Grade-B leads in the high teens, Grade-C in the low teens, and Grade-D dropped to single digits. Next Call Club saw a clear correlation between Real Contact API grading and downstream contact and quote performance. When the market tightens or quality dips across publishers, Next Call Club can tighten the filter to Grade-A only. When the supply is unusually strong, they can loosen to include Grade-C. That flexibility is what makes the API operationally valuable, not just a catch-all filter.
Beyond contact grading, Next Call Club has expanded their use of Real Contact API into list cleanup workflows. They’re scrubbing winback lists for agents who want to reengage former customers but are working from outdated phone numbers, and running address validation on direct mail lists where 30% bad addresses can mean significant wasted postage spend. The team also uses line type (particularly the distinction between mobile, landline, fixed- and non-fixed VoIP) to prioritize the contacts most likely to actually answer the phone.
The Impact
By running every lead through Real Contact API, Next Call Club dropped the rate of bad, wrong, or disconnected phone numbers from 10-20% down to 2-3%, a roughly 7x reduction in wasted dials for their insurance agent customers. Even just the initial phone and name verification delivered a 5-7% lift in quote rate, with Grade-A leads converting to quoted conversations at more than 2x the rate of Grade-C leads.
The benefits compound on both sides of the marketplace. For Next Call Club’s insurance agent customers, fewer junk leads means more time spent on conversations that can actually close, lower return volume, and stronger trust in the marketplace as a whole. For Next Call Club itself, the grading data has become a tool for curating their publisher mix. By sharing rejected leads and validation data back with publishers, Next Call Club helps those partners manage their own affiliates and identify less transparent lead vendors. The closed-loop data is something most lead publishers don’t get from buyers, which makes Next Call Club a more valuable partner upstream as well as downstream.
Real Contact API has also surfaced insights the team didn’t originally set out to find. Line type data made a clear difference in contact behavior. Numbers identified as landlines showed near-zero contact inquiry, while mobile numbers performed dramatically better. This gives the team an additional lever to prioritize the contacts most likely to engage.
Why Trestle
Next Call Club had used phone validation services before Trestle, including a larger competitor whose product was overbuilt and overpriced for what the team actually needed. Trestle delivered the variables that mattered most to them (identity, phone, email, and address) at a more reasonable cost, with the flexibility to isolate individual signals or use the combined verification depending on the workflow.
What most impressed Next Call Club, however, is the partnership itself. The Trestle team consistently asks for feedback, shares roadmap plans, and treats customers as collaborators rather than line items. This is a sharp contrast to the rigid, on-rails experience that defines so much of the data vendor space. When Next Call Club has needed introductions to complementary data partners, the Trestle team has made them. When they’ve raised specific data gaps, the team has worked to either solve them or be direct when something wasn’t on the roadmap. For a business whose own value prop is built on relationships and curation, that kind of partnership has been invaluable.
Next Call Club rated Trestle an average of 4.9 out of 5 across these core categories:
API reliability and uptime
Data quality and accuracy
Ease of integration
Documentation quality
Support responsiveness
Likelihood to recommend
Overall business value
Overall satisfaction
About Trestle
Trestle provides industry-leading phone data APIs to improve lead management and call operations for businesses. Trestle’s product suite is powered by a cutting-edge identity data graph built on top of modern, scalable technology and machine learning capabilities that have yielded the best-in-class coverage and accuracy. This, along with a network built on top of 500MM+ queries every month, enables Trestle to serve with a differentiated product suite that businesses rely on for various use cases, including caller identification, call routing, lead assessment, and prioritization.