When you integrate FullEnrich’s API, you’ll notice enrichment takes around 45-60 seconds per contact. If you’ve tried other providers in the past and it took 5-15 seconds to get a result, this might feel long. So let’s talk about what’s actually happening during that time, and what you’d be giving up if we made it faster.
We reject over 30% of the data our providers return to us. The numbers are invalid, the emails bounce, the data simply doesn’t pass our checks.When you request a phone number, we’re not just pulling it from a database and handing it to you. We’re running a gauntlet of validations:
We query a provider and find a number
We check if the number is even valid (proper format, real carrier)
We verify if it’s currently in service
We verify if it’s a mobile phone (we exclude landlines)
We confirm the line actually belongs to your prospect, not their old company or a recycled number
If you want to take a deeper look at how we verify emails and phone numbers, check out the articles below.
When any of these checks fail, we start over with another provider. Then another. Sometimes we go through 5, 10, 15 sources before we find a number that passes every validation, or before we’re confident enough to tell you there isn’t one.
We could have built just another data provider. One that responds in 10 seconds. Here’s what that would look like:These providers work from large static databases. That phone number has been sitting there for 3 years. The query is fast precisely because there’s no real work happening; just a simple database lookup.The result? Lower coverage (because they only have what’s in their database), uncertain quality (because data decays constantly), and ultimately, wasted time chasing dead numbers or wrong people.That’s not us. And it never will be.The whole reason we built FullEnrich is because the status quo wasn’t good enough. Most data providers deliver mediocre quality, and teams just accepted it as normal. We didn’t want to be another one of those. The quality and coverage we’re able to deliver today is a direct result of the process that takes that extra time.
This is counterintuitive, but the providers with the highest quality data are often the slowest. They’re doing real-time lookups, hitting live sources, running their own validations. A single provider might take 30 seconds to respond.Now multiply that by the 15-20 providers we query in a waterfall. Even at 5 seconds each, that adds up. And some of those slow providers are irreplaceable; they have coverage no one else can match.
When we built FullEnrich, we had to decide: do we optimize for speed, or do we optimize for quality?We chose quality.Not because fast isn’t appealing, but because we’ve seen what happens when enrichment prioritizes speed. Your CRM fills up with bad numbers. Your team burns hours on dead leads. Your deliverability tanks. The time you “saved” on enrichment costs you 10x in wasted effort downstream.That said, our engineering team is constantly working to reduce enrichment time. We optimize provider selection, parallelize where we can, and we’re willing to make trade-offs when they make sense. If an extra check would give us 0.2% more accuracy but add 30 seconds, we wouldn’t implement it. But we’ll never sacrifice the core validations that make our data reliable.
Most enrichments complete within 30 to 90 seconds per contact (average is 56s). What matters most is the value users get from the enrichment. If your product communicates that you’re sourcing data from many premium providers to guarantee the most complete and up-to-date information, users naturally accept the wait. The more transparent you are about the process, the more the waiting time feels justified.Best practices for integrating enrichment in your product:
Don’t block users during enrichment. Let them continue their workflow while the enrichment runs in the background.
Display a clear status in the UI so users know the process is ongoing.
Rotate between dynamic loading messages to make the experience smoother:
“Enrichment in progress…”
“Searching across 20 data providers…”
“Checking every corner…”
“Digging deeper…”
The wait feels proportional to the value delivered. Good communication turns patience into a signal of throughness.
