Using Reverse Phone API for Geographic Call Routing

The Problem:

Businesses around the world use a single phone number to handle inbound customer phone calls. This is certainly the simplest option in terms of telco/call center management, but there are a number of challenges this also creates for businesses with geographically distributed operations. 

There are many businesses that operate multiple physical locations or franchises to different operators. When customers must be serviced in-region, this can result in a poor customer experience.

Today, we see many businesses handle these situations by warm transfers, where the customer first speaks to someone who gathers their information before routing or adding a prompt (i.e. IVR) at the front end of the call to request the caller’s zip code. Transferring between customer service representatives is never a good experience for customers–who like giving the same information twice?–and zip code prompts add friction and drop-off. 

Companies trying to automate this routing typically start by leveraging NPA-NXX level location data (based on the North American numbering plan)–this is basically a static location tied to the area code of your phone number. As we all know, it’s very common for callers to move from their original area code, making this data too inaccurate to use. 

Theoretically, a business could leverage device data to help with routing, but this also introduces a bunch of problems—what if someone is traveling or their primary residence is far away from their work? This can’t be reliably used (and likely isn’t a permissible data use).

The Solution:

Trestle built its data set with phone owner location information top of mind. We use authoritative data sources to locate the primary address of the person behind a phone. We have a full address for 88%+  of the US adult population. We haven’t seen anyone else in the industry able to match this level of coverage. We only rely on NPA-NXX location as a last resort.

The Benefit and Impact of Using Trestle:

With this data, businesses are able to create routing tables that determine where to route a phone call based on the geolocation of that caller. Multiple Trestle customers use this data today either for their own internal routing purposes or to help distribute calls to partners/franchisees. 

We’ve helped a number of companies configure this solution–please reach out if you’d like to chat.