Phone Number Masking for Yelp Services Projects

Introduction

Phone number masking is a feature implemented by Yelp to enhance consumer trust in the services marketplace, streamline communication with service professionals, and allow for seamless switching between the Yelp app and a user's phone. While the Yelp messaging platform is convenient, some users may not regularly check the app for new business replies.

Masked Phone Communication for Services Projects

Yelp introduced a feature where customers can communicate with service providers via masked phone numbers through calls and SMS. When customers opt-in to share their number, Yelp assigns temporary masked numbers to facilitate communication between both parties through calls, SMS, and the Yelp app. Conversation history is synced between SMS messages and the Yelp messaging platform.

Integrating with a Telephony API

Yelp integrated with a telephony API provider to offer phone masking while keeping phone events in sync with the Yelp conversation. A "masking session" data model was developed to link customer and business numbers via a proxy number for routing messages and calls. This model minimizes the proxy number pool needed and scales costs with the number of conversations per month.

Phone Number Reuse

Phone number reuse allows the same number to participate in multiple masking sessions simultaneously, optimizing the allocation of proxy numbers.

Unique Number for Every Business

Instead of assigning a unique number for every conversation, a constant proxy number is used for each business on Yelp. This allows different customers to see the same number for a given business, with conversations differentiated based on sender/caller numbers.