Area codes are changing. Over the last seven years, an estimated 30% of all North American telephone numbers have been assigned new area codes. For anyone with a database of contacts (especially telemarketers and direct-sales companies) this creates a problem. The bigger the database, the bigger the problem. It is not unusual for a large database to have tens of thousands of records with bad area codes.

If area code changes happened all at once, the problem would be easy to manage; just create a glorified search-and-replace engine and run the database through it. The trouble is, area code changes are ongoing and complex, so much more sophisticated processing is needed, and it must be done over and over again. If you want more information on the complexities of area code changes, follow these links to learn about simple area code splits and nomenclature, time sensitivity, recursive splits, prefix duplication, and boundary realignments.

The Solutions

There are several ways to deal with the area code problem. You can get a listing of changed area codes, and manually dial each bad number with different area codes until you hit the correct one, but for a large list this is much too slow. You can hire a programmer (or use in-house programmers) to write custom software to update the area codes in your database. You can contract with a service house to "clean" your database at intervals. Or you can buy off-the-shelf software that always keeps your phone numbers up to date.

Custom software is the most expensive route. There is the learning curve for all the quirks of area code changes. And of course, your programmers must know WHICH area codes to change, WHEN each change occurred, WHETHER the change happened after the database was last updated, and WHAT the new area code is. This is far from trivial, since there are more than 30,000 area code/exchange code combinations that need changing.

Data cleaning services have developed software to deal with these issues, and they can apply the fix to your data. However, the process of freezing database updates, exporting all the needed information, transferring it to and from the service house, verifying its integrity and re-importing it is daunting, and the whole process has to be repeated every few months.

Off-the-shelf software for area code updates is available for most systems, and represents the best long-term solution for keeping up with area code changes. In the Windows world, there are two classes of programs: the simple "small business" type programs, usually sold for under $200, and full-featured "professional" packages. The simple ones are suitable for databases of up to a few thousand records; they tend to use a simple search-and-replace system, so they may not fix all your numbers perfectly. If you are dealing with tens of thousands or more records, the increased speed and accuracy of a high-end program will justify its higher cost.