Zenly Goes Viral with a Boost from the Vonage Verify API

Zenly is an iOS and Android mobile app that enables a user to locate friends or family members on a map—with pinpoint precision and in real time. The company’s mission is to make location sharing a joyful, ubiquitous and actionable experience for everyone, with a goal to serve 1 Billion users.

In order to achieve their ambitious growth goals, Zenly needed a way to tie a new registrant’s phone number to their Zenly account. The company implemented several SMS vendors to compliment their home-grown user verification process, but many users never received a PIN code.

If the user is unable to verify their phone number to access the app, they can’t invite their friends, thus preventing the Zenly user base from multiplying.

The inability to reach users was a business-critical issue, causing an increase in engineering resources, poor message delivery, lack of analytics, a friction-riddled user experience, and low conversion rates.

To provide the most seamless user verification and app installation process possible, Zenly partnered with Vonage for its Verify user authentication API, which builds on the strengths of Vonage's global reach and cloud-based SMS and Voice APIs.

Using the Vonage Verify API, Zenly is now able to:

• Send text messages with PIN codes for the recipient to enter, automatically changing the message language to the end user’s location

• Comply with all regional regulations associated with the end user’s destination country

• Facilitate an expedited user response. If Verify detected that the user had not entered the PIN within two minutes, the user was automatically resent the PIN code via a voice call in the appropriate language, enabling them to verify their mobile number in the Zenly app

Reaching Virality

Vonage's  global reach and adaptive routing capabilities made it possible for Zenly to substantially increase successful app installations.

Highlights include:

• Successfully activated users in over 180 countries

• Launching app with over 1 Million users

• 27% increase in global reach

• Eliminated filtering, routing and latency issues

• Implemented reliable, localized voice failover

 

“We definitely would not be able to achieve virality without a reliable, scalable phone number authentication solution, and we would not havebeen able to do that without Nexmo and the Verify API.”