How to setup SMS OTP Phone Verification?

What is SMS OTP Phone Verification?

SMS OTP Phone Verification is a feature of GetLeadForm that when enabled, allows you to validate phone numbers in real time right in your form. This means that you can prevent a prospect from submitting fake phone numbers, while ensuring that any leads that you (or your client) follows-up with has a real, validated phone number.

Short on time? What this video walk through:

How does OTP Phone Verification Work?

OTP stands for One-Time Passcode. Here's how it works:

Prospect enters their phone number in your LeadForm
If the phone verification is enabled then the form generates an authentication token in the form of a one-time four-digit PIN code. Our system sends the code to the prospect's phone number.
The prospect enters the pin-code that was sent to their phone right into the form and clicks 'Next'
If our system verifies the pin code, then the prospect can move forward with the rest of the form.

If the prospect inputs the incorrect PIN or no PIN at all, then the prospect will not be able to move forward with submitting your LeadForm. It's also worth noting that if at anytime, the prospect needs to re-enter the PIN, then they can easily go back and have a new PIN code sent.

Important Note: At the moment, OTP Phone Verification works for phone numbers only. In the near future, we have plans to roll out verification across other channels as well, such as email and push.

What are the benefits of using OTP Phone Verification?

There are a number of benefits to using OTP Phone Verification in your LeadForms. Here are just a few:

1) Prevent Incorrect or Fake Phone Numbers: Nothing is worse than getting a hot new lead, only to call them up moments later and find out that someone submitted the wrong phone number. This can be one of the most frustrating parts of online lead generation for almost every type of business.

2) Prevents Fake Leads: SMS OTP Phone Verification helps you capture the correct lead data and screen out leads that have no interest in actually purchasing your product and/or using your services. This is a great way to ensure that you're getting real leads with the highest intent.

3) Mitigates Bot Attacks: Cybercriminals use automated bots to create fake accounts for all sorts of crazy reasons ranging from spreading viruses to list bombing. This is one of the reasons why Invisible ReCaptcha has become so widely used in forms. We even offer ReCaptcha as a feature right in GetLeadForms. By requiring every lead to submit a real phone number that must be verified, it's one more barrier of defense that you can stand up between your business and the malicious actors our there.

Can My Lead Form Conversion Rate Drop When Using OTP Phone Verification?

As you're reading this you might be thinking... "wait, I'm adding more friction to my form, won't my conversion rates go down?"

If you're thinking the above, then you have a great point. And the truth is that implementing OTP Phone Verification into your LeadForm very well could bring your conversion rates down. However, the trade-off here is that your lead quality will go up and you will be getting the very best, high intent leads.

As a rule of thumb, we always prioritize lead quality over conversion rates. It's great getting a ton of leads rolling in, but what's even better is having the confidence that you (or your clients) can call up those leads without any doubt about the quality of the phone number and the intent.

At the end of the day, this is a business decision that you need to make. If your business doesn't rely on capturing real phone numbers, then you probably don't need to use this feature. However, if you're generating leads for an industry like a service business (plumber, roofer, pest control, legal), SaaS, mortgage, real-estate, insurance, etc.. then it might be a pretty good idea to try this feature out.

How Does Pricing for OTP Phone Verification Work?

There are various costs on our side when sending a One-Time Pin Code to phone numbers via SMS. For this reason, this is a feature that we cannot offer for free. With that being said, we have structured the pricing so it's affordable. It's a usage-based model with a low rate for each delivered lead.
Here's how pricing works:

Every request of a One-Time Passcode counts as 1 credit. So for example, if you generate 10 phone verification requests from a given form, then that counts as 10 credits.

Each month you get a certain number of credits assigned to your account. For example, let's say that you estimate that you need about 100 phone verification credits each month. You'll pre-pay for these 100 credits at a low rate per credit, then we will set your monthly limit to 100 credits. If you use 10 credits across your entire account during the first week of the month, then you have 90 credits remaining for the rest of the month. At the start of the next month, your credits restart and you're back to 100.

If you go over your monthly limit then don't worry your LeadForm and phone verification will continue to work. We'll simply get a notification letting us know that you went over. If it happens multiple times then we may reach out to speak with you about increasing your limits.

You can disable SMS verification at anytime for any form from your side, we'll get into that in a moment.

In summary: You simply tell us how many phone verification credits you need, then we add them to your account. From there, you can monitor credit usage and adjust as you go. That's all there is to it. No other hidden costs or setup fees. Just simple, straight-forward pricing.
To learn more about pricing and to have us provide a custom quote please submit this form:

How Do I Access & Activate OTP Phone Verification?

To begin using OTP Phone Verification you will need to request access. This is a feature that we will need to enable at your account level from the backend of our systems.

Here's where to access the Phone Verification feature:

Login to your GetLeadForms account and go to the Lead Delivery Tab
When in Lead Delivery, go to the Lead Verification section in the left hand side and click on the arrow to expand

How to Request Access

If the Phone Verification feature is turned-off at the account level, then you'll see a screen that contains some information about what the feature is and an 'activate' button. It will look something like in the image below:

To request for us to turn the feature on for your account, click on the red 'Request Access' button. Or go here: https://getleadforms.com/phone-verify-activate/

After you request access, we will activate the feature in your account and provide you with a number of monthly credits, based on your anticipated lead volume.

After the feature is turned-on at the account level by us, the screen will change and look like the image below:

The main difference here is that once the Phone Verification feature is turned-on for your account, you'll see a toggle switch that will allow you to turn Phone Verification on or off at the form level.

To enable the Phone Verification feature for a LeadForm, simply flip the toggle to the 'ON' position and click save and you'll see that the screen now shows some additional Usage details.

Upon turning the feature on at the LeadForm level, you'll see some additional Usage details which includes the following:

Credits Used this Month (This LeadForm): This is how many credits this specific form has used in the given month that you're in. So if the month is May and your form has used 10 credits for just this LeadForm, then the number of credits used will equal 10.
Total Monthly Verification Credits: This is how many credits is assigned to your entire account, across all LeadForms.
Monthly Credits Remaining: This detail reflects how many credits are remaining at the account level, after subtracting all credits used across all forms that have OTP Phone Verification Enabled.
- For example: Imagine that you have 100 monthly credits across your entire account and you're using the Phone Verification across three forms: The first LeadForm uses 10 credits, the second LeadForm uses 50 credits, and the third LeadForm uses 20 credits. In total you've used 80 credits (10 + 50 + 20), which means that you have 20 credits remaining on your account. As a reminder, if you go over your credit limit in a given month, then you will not be charged for additional credit usage and PIN verification will not turn-off. We will simply reach out to you and let you know.
Cost Per SMS Verification: Finally, below the table you'll see how much you're paying for each SMS verification credit.

How To Setup SMS Phone Verification With OTP In Your LeadForm

In this section, we'll take you through the steps required to get the Phone Verification Feature working for your LeadForm.

Follow the steps below:

Request for the SMS Phone Verification feature to be activated for your account following the steps outlined above.
Turn on SMS Phone Verification for the LeadForm following the steps outlined above.
After SMS phone verification is enabled, go to the step of the form where you want to setup your phone verification field. Let's say that it's the Contact form step.
Next, we're going to need to add a Phone field to the form. click on the blue '+Add form field' button
After you click 'Add form field', give the field a name and a label (this can be anything) then set the Field Type dropdown to Phone and the Value Type dropdown to Phone.
Click the blue 'Save form field' button and you'll see the field appear. It will appear with a country code pre-fix. All countries are included and you can see them by clicking on the dropdown.
That's all there is to it! As long as phone verification is enabled at the form level, then whenever someone completes this step they will be sent to a special One-time passcode step before the next step in the process. If you turn the feature off, then the form will continue to work as it should, except the one-time passcode step will be skipped.

How to test that the one-time passcode feature is enabled and working:

To run a quick test, simply click Preview in the upper right hand corner.

Once inside of the Preview Screen, you can preview how the form will work with the Phone Verification feature enabled. When in preview mode, an actual PIN Code will be sent to whatever phone number that you enter in the phone field. So we highly suggest using your own phone number.

Some important notes:

Preview mode will not deliver email and SMS lead notifications or post requests to your CRM, but it will send a one-time pin request.
For the reason above we suggest using a valid phone number that you can check.
In addition, any tests that you send from preview mode will count against your credit limit since there are costs associated with delivering the SMS message.

All said and done, to get SMS Verification working, all you need to do is request access to the feature, enable the feature at the LeadForm level, then set the phone field to use the field and value types of 'Phone'.

Just a few simple steps, and you'll be able to easily verify phone numbers right from your LeadForm. That's all there is to it!

If you run into any issues or need any help getting started, please reach out to support at support@getleadforms.com

Thank you!