Find the phone number of a business

This purpose of this task is to make sure that the phone number shown for a business on Bing
will allow users to successfully contact the business.

Procedure
You will see the business details that are being evaluated on the left side of the screen when
you load a hit. Your task is to find a good web resource that shows this name and address and
determine what phone number this business uses.

You will have access to a tool to perform web research with the provided information.

This tool allows you to select the Name, Address attributes, and Phone (click the words) to
perform a search on Google or Bing to find an official website or social site from the business.
You can also type words in the box (like “Facebook”) to include this in your search terms. If a
Url is provided, you can use the “site” checkbox to perform a search exclusively on this domain.
This can be helpful for more complex or difficult to navigate websites. If a functional website is
not provided, you will have to find one. (How to site: search ↗ and Bing/Chrome extension ↗.)

Good and Bad Resources

Good Resources
• Official website (“business
name”.com)
• Official free hosting site with activity
from the business in the past 365
days (“business name”.weebly.com)
• Official Facebook page with recent
posts from the business (365 days)
Bad Resources (DO NOT USE)
• Business listings on Google or Bing
• Unofficial aggregator pages
(manta.com, localbest.com, etc.)
• Unofficial or outdated Facebook
pages (posts are only user comments,
or over 365 days old from the
business)

The website must show a name and address that match the provided business details. The
general principle for addresses is, so long as they refer to the same location, they are a match.
Judgment Selection
After completing your research, you can make your selection:

You will have these options:

• Top Phone. The newly suggested phone number (if it has been provided by the user).
• Bottom Phone. The existing phone number associated with the entity (if one exists).
• Manual Entry. If top/bottom phones are wrong or they aren’t provided, you can select
“Values above are missing or wrong” to manually type in the correct number. Do not
include country code, dashes, dots, or spaces.
• Should be Empty. Choose this option for businesses that don’t give out a number.
Before you choose this, try to find a matching Facebook1 page – it may have the phone
number.
• Unable to Verify (no web presence). If the business does not have any web presence at
all, you will not be able to judge the phone number and will have to select “Unable to
Verify”. It may be that the information you’re being shown is for a business that does
not exist, or it may just be a small local business that doesn’t believe that it needs to
have a website or social profile. In either case, you will select Unable to Verify.

In the Pawn King example, we can verify that the first option is correct from the listing on the
official website.

1
Okay to use: Facebook, Dianping, Ctrip, Practo if claimed, Ekiten, Hotpepper, Gnavi, Tabelog, VK, and OK.
Manual entry. If the provided phone number had been wrong, for example if it had been
submitted with a typo as (217) 544-7332, you would need to select “Values above are missing
or wrong” and manually enter in the number. You will need to enter in the phone number
without the country code (in the United States, that’s the “1” that is shown at the beginning of
a number), and with no spaces or special characters. In this case, you would want to enter
2175447322.

We want phone numbers to work nationally. This means the phone number dialed as written
will work to and from any part of the country the phone number belongs to, and with no
country code included. You can refer to Wikipedia’s list of country calling codes if you are
unsure of what this is for the country of the business under review, so that you can change to
national format if the provided phones or phone on the website show you only international
format.

Businesses With No Phone Number

A business may not always provide a phone number; the nature of their business may not
require the possibility of interacting with them over the phone. For a business like this, you
should select “I verified value should be empty”. But please note that some businesses may
have multiple locations that do not have specific numbers associated with the address but
feature general contact numbers for all locations. For businesses like this, we would want to
use the general phone number rather than saying the phone value should be empty.

Redbox does have a general phone number on their contact us page, even though no phone
number is listed for individual locations. For a Redbox entity, we should have this general
number, since it may be helpful for users with questions or concerns (type in 8667332693).
You can see with the above business, they don’t provide any type of phone number on their
contact page or on their official social site.

Before you choose “Should be empty”, try to find a matching Facebook2 page – it may have the
phone number.

Reminders
Watch out for scammers! There are individuals who are trying to hijack existing business
listings with fraudulent phone numbers, and they are relying on you to approve their suggested
changes. These can be avoided by ensuring that you are only updating the phone numbers
using official sources. This is most common with airlines but could potentially happen with any
business.

Be careful about departments. If the provided name indicates a specific department, like the
Cardiology department of a hospital, this is the phone number you need to be using.

Similarly, you need to make sure you are not using a department phone number if the name
indicates only the hospital.

2
Okay to use: Facebook, Dianping, Ctrip, Practo if claimed, Ekiten, Hotpepper, Gnavi, Tabelog, VK, and OK.
Some businesses have multiple numbers. Some businesses will not appear to have a primary
phone number, and will simply list the number for different departments. For hits like this, you
will want to select the department that appears to be the primary point of contact.

Examples:
- Car Dealership: this would be the sales department rather than service
- Hotels: you’ll want the front desk, or “general inquiries”
Universities: ‘General inquiries’ would be the correct choice, or “visitors” (when these are not
present, you can go with “admissions” or “registration”)
It would be impossible to list every possible example, so you will have to use your best
judgment.

When there is genuinely no difference between

multiple phone numbers shown on an entity
website, select the one that appears first. In this
screenshot, we can see that 800-426-5708 is
listed above the other phone number. This
should be the number that is used.