CRM data quality degrades constantly. Phone numbers go stale as contacts change carriers, disconnect lines, or port numbers to new providers. Industry estimates suggest that 20-30% of phone records in a typical CRM become inaccurate within a year. For sales, marketing, and support teams that rely on phone outreach, this means wasted calls, undelivered messages, and skewed reporting — problems that compound the longer bad data sits in your system.
Phone validation fixes this by verifying phone numbers against real-time carrier data, giving you accurate line type, deliverability, and carrier information for every contact in your database.
The Cost of Bad Phone Data
Bad phone numbers create problems across every team:
- Sales — Reps waste 15-20% of their calling time on disconnected numbers, wrong numbers, and landlines that don’t answer. That’s hours per week per rep spent on contacts that will never convert.
- Marketing — SMS campaigns sent to invalid numbers burn budget and damage sender reputation. High bounce rates can trigger carrier filtering that affects your entire messaging program.
- Support — Outbound support calls to stale numbers create tickets that bounce between teams without resolution.
- Operations — Inaccurate data makes it impossible to segment contacts accurately, forecast pipeline reliably, or report on channel performance.
How Phone Validation Cleans CRM Data
On Import
Validate every phone number when contacts are first imported into your CRM. Flag or reject numbers that are invalid, disconnected, or landlines (if your primary channel is SMS). This prevents bad data from entering your system in the first place.
On a Schedule
Run quarterly or monthly batch validation on your existing contact database. Phone numbers change status constantly — a number that was active six months ago may be disconnected today. Regular revalidation catches these changes before your teams waste time on dead contacts.
At the Point of Update
When a contact updates their phone number through a form, portal, or support interaction, validate the new number in real time before saving it to the CRM.
What Validation Adds to Each Contact Record
When you validate a phone number through the CheckThatPhone API, you can enrich each CRM record with:
- Line type — Mobile, landline, or VoIP. Determines which channels are viable for each contact.
- Carrier — The current operating carrier. Useful for routing decisions and segment analysis.
- Deliverability — Whether the number can receive calls and SMS right now.
- Porting status — Whether the number has been transferred between carriers.
- Timezone — The contact’s local timezone based on GeoIP or area code, enabling time-appropriate outreach.
Integration Patterns
Most CRMs support webhook-based or API-driven enrichment:
- Salesforce / HubSpot — Trigger validation on lead creation or update via workflow automation
- Custom CRM — Call the API directly from your backend when records are created or modified
- Batch processing — Export your contact list, validate via the API, and re-import with enriched fields
Getting Started
Clean CRM data isn’t a one-time project — it’s an ongoing process. Phone validation gives you the tools to keep your contact database accurate and actionable, reducing wasted effort across sales, marketing, and support. Read the API documentation to integrate phone validation into your CRM workflows, or explore pricing plans to find the right tier for your database size.