SEATTLE, WA — (Marketwired) — 10/10/13 — , the leading provider of contact information for people and businesses in the U.S., today officially opened its platform to the marketplace, which was initially introduced to select customers in 2012 to provide business users with access to the industry-s most comprehensive set of consumer contact information. Now, WhitePages PRO provides business users with a full 360 degree view of their customers, helping online merchants detect fraud and validate customer identity, call centers to decrease average handle times, and marketers to validate and prioritize customer leads.
“While WhitePages.com is the most popular site for contact information on the web, it is designed for consumers, not businesses,” said Alex Algard, founder and CEO of WhitePages. “We built WhitePages PRO in response to an overwhelming demand for a solution designed to specifically help business users achieve a wide spectrum of goals, from increasing efficiencies to decreasing fraud.”
The upgraded platform, available via web interface and API, now identifies millions more addresses and people that correspond with mobile phone numbers — providing increased intelligence about a person-s location information beyond what was available in the early WhitePages PRO offering, and helping businesses to better validate customers- identities.
As part of a multi-year investment, WhitePages officially unveils its Contact Graph, a technology and data infrastructure that connects people, addresses, and various cell and landline phone numbers. Powering the WhitePages PRO offering, the Contact Graph gives companies the critical insight required to confirm identities based on how customers are linked to other user-submitted and public data. With the Contact Graph, WhitePages PRO helps marketers validate user identities, eliminate fraudulent information and enrich legitimate leads. To see a diagram illustrating the Contact Graph infrastructure, .
With more than one-third of American homes (35.8 percent) reporting that they have only wireless telephones(1), mobile phone data is becoming increasingly important to businesses that need to dynamically verify customer identification. The WhitePages Contact Graph organizes information from multiple data sources — including millions of newly-added addresses — to associate mobile phone numbers with full addresses when available. WhitePages PRO automatically taps into WhitePages- Contact Graph to validate customer contact information with data stored in WhitePages- database to help merchants confirm customer identity before a transaction is processed; call centers improve customer service by decreasing the amount of information that each customer is asked to share live; and marketers to prioritize their leads by validating contact information provided by potential customers.
“Consumers continue to cut the cord and opt for mobile only, taking their numbers with them when they move. This has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to verify users through the often disparate mobile and address information they provide,” continued Algard. “PRO allows businesses to match even more of their customers with contact data in real time, not only helping them to improve efficiencies but also improving how they serve their customers.”
The new WhitePages PRO platform includes a brand new identity score product, which automatically analyzes customer data by running it through WhitePages- Contact Graph in order to assess the validity of the customer identity. The identity score product then leverages WhitePages- proprietary data and algorithms to present a convenient score (e.g. A,B,C,D), which helps determine what action to take next. Customers with outdated or invalid data are likely to yield a low identity score (C,D), which may prompt further review of the transaction. On the other hand, customers with valid, up-to-date contact information will yield a high identity score (A,B), indicating that the transaction is legitimate and can be moved immediately through the screening process to fulfillment.
“Many merchants spend more time reviewing legitimate orders than fraudulent ones,” continued Algard. “Our identity score product is designed to help merchants quickly validate consumer contact information, so that they can speed up orders and hit their revenue goals quicker.”
Companies have seen a 20 percent decrease in manual review query volume when using WhitePages PRO, which is expected to increase with adoption of the new platform. Call Centers leveraging WhitePages PRO have reported an average of 30 seconds of decreased customer service call durations.
More information on the WhitePages PRO platform can be found
WhitePages PRO [] gives businesses access to WhitePages- contact data, providing a 360 degree view of customers. This intelligence helps to validate online purchasers to identify both fraudulent and legitimate transactions, drive greater efficiency from call centers, and enrich contact records to strengthen customer interactions. Early customers include Vizio, Ann Inc. and Oakley.
WhitePages is the leading provider of contact information for people and businesses in the U.S. With over 50 million unique monthly users and powering over 2 billion searches per year across sites that include WhitePages.com and 411.com, WhitePages offers consumers one-click access to more than 200 million adults and also provides them with the ability to edit and control their own listings. The company-s suite of mobile products includes a top-50 mobile website and popular Android and iPhone apps with over 15 million active monthly users.
(1) Center for Disease Control, 2012 National Health Interview Survey
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