The Scenario
Your retail brand just negotiated a bulk SMS price break with your vendor. The loyalty list has 3,000 mobile numbers in an Excel workbook — collected over the past 18 months from in-store sign-ups, the app, and a third-party data append. Your last SMS campaign had a 28% non-delivery rate. The vendor is charging per delivered message, not per sent message, and your budget can't absorb another campaign where nearly a third of messages disappear.
Your marketing manager needs to know which of these numbers are currently active on a network before the purchase order goes to the vendor.
The bad version:
- Find an HLR lookup provider with Excel/CSV bulk support, export the workbook to CSV, upload
- Wait 40 minutes for results, download the file, find it uses different column ordering than expected
- Map the results back against the original workbook rows — fail on 400 numbers where the results file stripped the leading plus sign from international numbers
The price break window expires in 24 hours. This is not where today was supposed to go.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. Through its built-in Neutrino integration, it runs HLR lookups on every number in column A and writes the active status and current carrier inline — no re-importing, no column alignment problems.
For each mobile number in column A, run a Neutrino HLR lookup and write whether the number is active in column B and the current carrier name in column C. Mark any inactive number with INACTIVE and any ported number with PORTED.
What You Get
- Column B: ACTIVE, INACTIVE, or PORTED for every row
- Column C: current carrier name as returned by the HLR lookup
- Results are inline — filter column B to ACTIVE and the qualified list is ready for the vendor
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Numbers are formatted inconsistently across rows
Normalize all phone numbers in column A to E.164 format, then run Neutrino HLR lookups and write active status in column B and current carrier in column C.
You want inactive rows highlighted for visual review
Run Neutrino HLR lookups on all numbers in column A. Write ACTIVE, INACTIVE, or PORTED in column B. Highlight INACTIVE rows in column A red and PORTED rows orange.
You need to compare the current carrier against the carrier on file at sign-up in column B
Run Neutrino HLR lookups on all numbers in column A. Write the current carrier in column C. Flag any row where the current carrier in column C differs from the sign-up carrier in column B with PORTED in column D.
Full SMS list qualification in one shot
Normalize all numbers in column A, run Neutrino HLR lookups, write active status in column B and current carrier in column C, remove all INACTIVE rows, flag PORTED rows in orange, and produce a summary showing the count of active, inactive, and ported numbers before filtering.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your loyalty contact workbook, then ask SheetXAI to run Neutrino HLR lookups on column A before committing to the SMS vendor purchase order. See also the phone validation spoke if you want carrier and number type data alongside the active-status check.