Phone Number Verification
How phone numbers are validated, normalised to E.164, and flagged for format issues.
What Phone Validation Checks
Phone validation in Trust Leads checks that a phone number: (1) contains only valid digit, space, dash, parenthesis, and plus characters; (2) has a plausible number of digits for a real phone number (7–15 digits per the ITU-T E.164 standard); and (3) has a recognisable country code prefix if provided.
We do not perform live carrier lookups or SIM verification — this would require per-lookup fees and is outside the scope of the enrichment pipeline. What we do provide is format validation and normalisation, which is sufficient to catch the large majority of bad phone data that accumulates in CRMs.
E.164 Normalisation
E.164 is the international phone numbering standard: a leading plus sign, country code, area code, and subscriber number with no spaces or punctuation, up to 15 digits total. Example: +12125551234 for a New York City number. This format is universally accepted by CRMs, dialers, and SMS platforms.
When phone numbers pass format validation, Trust Leads writes the normalised E.164 version to the phone_formatted column. The original value from your CSV is preserved in the phone column. If a number cannot be normalised (missing country code and no country context available), phone_formatted is left empty and phone_valid is set to 'false'.
# Examples of normalisation
Input: (212) 555-1234 → phone_formatted: +12125551234 (assumed US)
Input: +44 20 7946 0958 → phone_formatted: +442079460958
Input: 07911 123456 → phone_formatted: +447911123456 (UK mobile)
Input: 555-1234 → phone_formatted: "" (ambiguous, no country code)
Input: 999 → phone_formatted: "" (too short)Phone Flags and Lead Score Impact
The phone_valid column is 'true' if the number passed all format checks and was successfully normalised. If phone_valid is 'false', the enrichment_flags column will contain INVALID_PHONE or MISSING_PHONE to distinguish between a present-but-bad number versus a missing one.
Phone validity contributes 10 points to the lead score. A missing phone does not heavily penalise the score because many valid B2B contacts are genuinely phone-number-free — especially when sourced from LinkedIn profiles or email newsletters. An invalid phone (present but unparseable) does penalise more heavily, as it suggests the entire record may be low quality.
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