As part of contacting a clinic we ask consumers to enter their mobile number, this allows us to text the phone number of the clinic to them. As noted by Tim in an earlier post, phone numbers are problematic and we strive to handle any format that the user might throw at us. Never-the-less a huge number of these number fail for a variety of reasons including:
- 1. The user has entered a land line and not a mobile number. This is perfectly valid and doesn’t represent an error state, however it does mean that we can’t give these users the same experience as those that enter the right number
2. The user has decided to leave the field blank. Once again this is a valid input and is the users prerogative.
3. The user has entered a deliberately distorted number – i.e. a string of 9 zeros.
I thought it would be interesting to share some statistics. In the first two weeks of July we attempted to send out text messages to 5,296 users. Of which:
• 3,660 had valid mobile number
• 2,884 responded with an automatic sms receipt. We expect that the remaining valid number has SMS receipt turned off on their phone or on their network
• 1,534 failed
Of the 1,534 that failed
• 414 had no phone number
• 1013 have what looks like a valid land line number
• 107 had a deliberately distorted input
