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Phone Numbers

Validate and automate your port outs

Published:

April 28, 2016

Updated:

August 8, 2019

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If I were to ask a room full of folks whose business relies on phone numbers (in any way) if they’ve ever had challenges porting phone numbers, I’d wager that most of the room would raise a hand and many could offer a painful story about it to boot. We hear these stories all the time from our customers, and today I’m excited to share some exciting news about how the Bandwidth Dashboard API can automate and protect your port out activity.

Porting out phone numbers (when a customer leaves one service for another) presents both customer satisfaction and regulatory challenges. For the latter, we take our provider responsibilities seriously and comply with the FCC’s best practices around number porting, an important process that promotes provider competition and allows end users greater freedom of choice. This means we’ve got speedy turnaround times for port out requests: 24 hours for wireline, 4 hours for wireless (single TNs).

From a customer satisfaction perspective, it’s challenging to merge the logistics of managing our compliance responsibilities with collecting information on all of our customers’ phone numbers in such a way that we can adhere to port-out timeframes, collect information on all of our customers’ end users (who may be resold several times over), and then avoid passing operational burden onto our customers.

We’re problem solvers at heart and have come up with a solution that meets all of the above requirements and allows our customers to fully automate a port out validation process. Our new Port Out API patches our customers directly into the port out flow in order to validate requests through automation.

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This is a unique solution that allows our customer to be inserted into the port-out validation flow in accordance with FCC rules and industry practices while avoiding requiring our customers to add staffing as they grow.
Can this work? Our beta testing with a group of early-adopting customers is giving a resounding “yes!”

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If you’d like to learn more about how the Bandwidth Dashboard Communications APIs can automate your telecom processes and deliver operational efficiency, contact me directly to get started!