• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, August 20, 2014

The two trends driving the partnership between Whitepages Pro, the company's directory enterprise division, and Twilio announced this week center on better customer satisfaction and personalized experiences. One part of this is faster call center results in much less time, along with call-tracking capabilities and the ability to verify the caller's identity.

In call center customer service platforms, data has become invaluable. The more consumers share their voice on social networks and in blogs, the better customer service will become. Let's face it -- no company wants a bad review. The CMO Council's annual State of Marketing global benchmark study released Monday suggests the drive for better customer service comes from consumers on digital channels with new insights that amplify the consumer's voice.

Whitepages joined Twilio's partner program, although the idea to give customer service reps enough data to improve call center efficiencies is not new. Although most companies understand that it's something they need to support business, few of them do. Whitepages PRO provides businesses with the ability to match mobile phone numbers with detailed street information, which is important in identifying incoming callers to personalize calls and shorten call processing time within call center operations. Data helps reduce keystroke errors in data entry, which can strengthen customer and agent satisfaction.

The data from Whitepages PRO's APIs provide the dataset around the person or business behind a phone number, including the person or the business name, the location, along with the current and the previous address associated with the number, carrier, status on the Do Not Call list, SPAM score and more.

The data comes from Whitepages' contact database, per the company's API Product Manager Kushal Shah. Applications crunch the data, the APIs connect to Twilio's suite of products, and the data is served through the PRO Graph API connection.

APIs were built on top of the company's Contact Graph to give the support staff the critical insight to confirm identities, allowing for better customer interactions, either through shortened call times or even personalized messaging.