We are pleased to announce an important upgrade to our flagship DOTS Address Validation – US service and the underlying address engine, which supports many of our other data validation services.
As a result of our partnership with the United States Postal Service, our address validation service includes the Residential Delivery Indicator (RDI) flag: a key indicator of whether an address is a business or a residence. A recent USPS update substantially enhances the amount of data available with RDI, and as of the end of October, all of our products using Address Validation have been upgraded to use this latest data.
A look under the hood
What’s the big deal about an upgrade like this?
In short, this change impacts anyone accessing USPS data sets, especially where this is a focus on RDI. The most critical impact is that new data is not available until these changes are accommodated for in the address engine. Meaning – address validation services would not be able to update their address data after early October unless modifications have been made. To a lesser degree but still important, you also do not have access to the enhanced RDI data that the USPS is now providing.
On the surface, making changes to an address engine to accommodate these modifications may sound simple. This was not. Once the USPS made the technical documentation available in mid-October, we immediately started rebuilding our address engine to accommodate them. It required extensive code and logic updates, comprehensive testing, and a commitment to having the most up-to-date data available. In short, our developers were on top of this and had it tested and ready to go in only a couple of short weeks after the update.
As a result, Service Objects is among the early adopters to take advantage of this enhanced data and ensures that we continue to provide the most up-to-date and accurate address data that is available from the USPS.
Beyond Address Validation-US, many of our other services rely on our address engine and will inherit the benefits from these improvements, including:
- Lead Validation and Lead Validation International
- Address Insight
- Address Detective
- Order Validation
- NCOA Live (Change of Address)
- Address Geocode
- FastTax
- Phone Append
Details on RDI capabilities are available in our Developers Guides.
Keeping you current
This upgrade is part of a larger commitment from Service Objects to ensure that your address data is as genuine, accurate, and as up-to-date as possible. A big part of this is our close relationships with authoritative data providers like the United States Postal Service.
You can count on us to keep you out in front of the latest capabilities in contact data validation. And as always, our friendly product experts are always here to help you make the most out of any of our services. Combined with guaranteed 99.9999% uptime and available 24/7 support, we are the secure choice for your mission-critical business data needs.
