Integrating Phone Numbers into Brand Identity Verification

Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moot, head of developer relations here at Square, and today I'm joined by Binh Ly who's a member of our developer community and is the owner and operator of the company operating. Ben, thank you so much for joining us here. I'm so excited to chat more with you about what it is that you've built on the Square Developer platform. You're also a hackathon winner. I'd love for you to just tell us all a little bit more about how you first got involved with Square and a little bit about your involvement on the Hackathon.

Binh Ly: First, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So Square has been on my radar since around the time of the company's founding. I was working with a device that could handle credit card swipes, but I wasn't using that component of the device, but I was trying to think of a reason to use it. And then back then the thought was like it stinks is when you go to the restaurant and you're with your friends, so why can't you split that check? So we're like, let's try and build something to do that. But back then onboarding a merchant account was not that fun. So that lag time and making the sale and then getting the software activated for someone was too long, but we were fascinated that Square could do it in two minutes. So I was like, Square is pretty interesting. So I just followed the company's trajectory that whole time. And then I finally switched careers since I changed the thing that I was working on from shipping software to messaging software around 2017. So that was the first version of Operator that existed in a different company. And back then the idea was that you should be able to message any company, but how do you do that without selling software at every business in the country? So we had this really insane approach where if you text it into the system, we would call the business and ask them the information and then text it back, but,

Richard Moot: Oh wow.

Binh Ly: That was pretty neat that it worked that way, but ultimately wasn't scalable.

But then once we realized that you could send text messages to the landlines, that changed everything because a majority of businesses have landlines and SMS is the most installed software on earth. So to get the customer you didn't have the two sided problem, the software was already on the phone. We just need to collect the text messages sent to the landline and present it to the business owner.

Richard Moot: I mean, I always think that that part is fascinating to me because it's still, even after you submitted the hackathon thing and every time I come back to it, I think this is something that most people just don't think is possible of getting SMS on a landline. So for those who are not familiar with this, how is this able to work or to what degree could you sort explain how this works to us?

Binh Ly: Yes. So the way it was explained to me about how it works is that you can picture a gigantic phone book and there's every phone number, every landline number is in there, and there's imagine two fields next to every phone. Number one says data traffic and one says voice traffic. So when you get a cell phone, the voice traffic says whoever your carrier is, AT&T, Verizon or whatever. And then the same for the data field, but for a landline, the data field is empty. So when you send a text message from your cell phone to a landline, it just goes to nowhere because it doesn't know where to route it. So by taking over provisioning the landline for voice traffic or data traffic, we're saying route that to the operator system.

Richard Moot: I see. And so does this require any kind of physical component or is this actually something that's like they just, it's done within at the carrier level?

Binh Ly: It's all at the carrier level.

Richard Moot: I see, okay.

Binh Ly: Yeah, so to actually utilize this capability, you just need authorization from the business that owns the landline. And so they just signed their name on a letter of authorization and we submit that to the carriers and then a few hours later, traffic starts flowing through. So that's one of the moments of delight for the customer is that they didn't realize this was happening. They signed up and they started getting traffic coming in and they're like, I didn't tell anyone we can do this. So I'm like, it's already happening all day every day and now you're getting access to it.

Richard Moot: So what you're saying there is have some businesses signed up for this and suddenly without even prompting of people are getting text messages and didn't realize that people were texting them this whole time? Yes. Wow.

Binh Ly: Yes

Richard Moot: Wow

Binh Ly: So a lot of missed business happens this way. We just saw, we signed up a window tinting business without telling any of their customers. They're getting requests, can I get a quote on this tint? If they didn't have the service, they would not know about that requirement. And the other cool thing is that it's not replacing anything. You get the voice traffic still and now you get the data traffic. It's up to the business owner how they want to respond. They can call 'em back if they want that hyper personal touch or just text back, which majority of the customers who interact with the platform prefer that just text, send text, and off you go.

Richard Moot: I mean, I'm guilty of that. I've been so stoked in the recent years that more and more businesses are allowing texting directly to these lines because it's been able to reschedule. I mean, giving my car serviced at this local car shop, it's so much easier that I get a little text message, Hey, your car's ready and you text back and great, I'll be there by two and I don't have to answer a phone call meetings all day. Most of the time I just let that go to voicemail and then I hope that I can text 'em back to say, Hey, I'll be there. So it's so convenient.

Binh Ly: That voicemail aspect is also a really interesting component of the customer communication. We found that people don't leave voicemails. So if someone calls you miss the call and then they don't leave a voicemail, it's really hard to have any context around that. So we invented this technique where if you call the landline, someone calls your landline and if no one picks up, the system will text you back from that landline number. So it's not a spooky experience with a caller. If you called one number, then you got a text back from another number saying, Hey, I saw that you called. It's kind of a weird experience. So you probably ignore that too. But if you call one number and you get text back from the same number, the response is pretty immediate.

Richard Moot: Yeah, I mean it's so validating because like the phone number for a lot of businesses, this is a form of identity for them. And so by keeping it all within that one thing, it feels very cohesive. You can trust it. I've definitely had this spooky thing happen where I call one place and then I get a text back from another and I'm like, I feel like I'm being, this is a weird phishing thing going on.

Binh Ly: Yes.

Richard Moot: You definitely don't want to have more of that.

Binh Ly: Exactly. And a lot of businesses don't realize until you point it out to them that their phone number is part of their branding. So if you drive by auto shops or something, you'll see the name of the business and sometimes the phone number is just as large in the typeface. So now you can maximize the utilization of that number, put a simple call or text this number in. In comes the traffic.

Richard Moot: And so you have this technology of being able to do this SMS routing, and then you built an app for R Square hackathon and you won. Tell us a little bit about more what you built and why you built it for the hackathon.

Binh Ly: Yes. So the project that won the hackathon was not the project that I started with. The initial project was digital appointment cards. So if you book through Square Appointments today, you'll get an email and in that email are a couple of links to add to your calendar. That's over email. But if you think about in real world scenarios and medical practices, for example, or dental, you go in, you do your checkup or whatever at a dental office and they say see the front desk before you leave. So you go out there and they say they want to see you in six months, they put it into their system and then they write down your information on a card and hand it to you. So it's on you to either remember that forever until the appointment or enter it into your own calendar. So I didn't know at the time that Square sent that email that lets you add to the calendar. So I thought, let's do that over SMS, but I built that those tied in Square Appointments and it sent you a text where you can add it to your calendar. Then we saw that you could do that over email. I was like, oh no, this is the saddest thing, all this work. Then I vaguely recalled an article I saw on your website about the number of no-show and cancellations,

And it reminded me that it's like the missed call thing. Again, if you don't figure out how to respond to that, you're going to lose it hundred percent. So we looked into how do we, could we hijack that process? If there's a no-show or a cancellation, can we help the business try and recover that? At least take a shot at it, right? 50/50 chance of getting that business. So that was the genesis of that.

Richard Moot: And to be honest, we were very inspired by that because being able to recoup even half or a quarter of those no-shows is that could be the difference between making or breaking it in a given month or quarter for a business. And I think the other part that you had mentioned previously that was also really impressi