Service Objects currently offers a total of 25 data quality products, ranging from contact data validation to detailed sales and use tax calculation. But our roots began in 2001 with address validation, designed to reduce the amount of misdirected direct mail pieces to save businesses money and protect the environment.
Address validation remains the foundation of what we do. Physical mail, package delivery and direct mail marketing and other address-based applications have only grown in the past two decades and continue to be a large part of our clients’ business needs. In response to this, we have expanded our DOTS (Data On Time Solutions) address validation APIs to cover an extensive array of needs, and now validate over 250 countries addresses. In this article, we will give you an overview of all of our current address validation capabilities, together with the best ways to put them to use and access to comprehensive developer resources.
Products for US addresses
Our US address validation products combine our close linkage with US Postal Service data with sophisticated analysis tools and extensive results data, to give you the best in contact address data quality and deliverability.
These products include:
DOTS Address Validation – US
Our flagship CASS-certified US address validation API takes input addresses and validates, corrects and appends them in conjunction using continually updated USPS address data as well as proprietary algorithms. It represents a cost-effective way to ensure accuracy and deliverability for your contact address data.
Some features to highlight:
- USPS Delivery Point Validation (DPV) – verifies that an address is a valid deliverable postal address
- Residential Delivery Indicator (RDI) – flags residential versus business addresses
- SuiteLink data for enhanced delivery intelligence of locations with suite numbers
When to use:
Address Validation – US is a full-featured address validation product designed to ensure accuracy and deliverability for any US postal address. Whether you are sending a million direct marketing mail pieces, invoices or delivering products, this service ensures delivery and prevents waste.
Developer Resources:
DOTS NCOA Live
This product links directly with the USPS’ NCOALink service to provide up-to-data change of address data against the USPS’ database of more than 40 million annual moves. It validates and corrects both residential and business addresses. For larger volume requests, NCOA Live’s real-time, RESTful API supports up to 500 records in a single request and multiple requests running in parallel.
When to use:
NCOA Live is designed for applications where it is important to “follow” contacts and obtain new, accurate delivery addresses, rather than simply validating existing addresses. One example of the need for this service is an automotive manufacturer needing to reach their customers to inform them of a safety recall.
Developer Resources:
DOTS Address Detective – US
This service uses advanced fuzzy matching techniques to correct and append your most difficult address records, using any available data points. It includes the full CASS-certified capabilities of our Address Validation – US product, together with a confidence score from 0 to 100 to help you use business logic with returned and corrected addresses.
When to use:
Address Detective – US helps save important leads and customers whose addresses can’t be verified as deliverable, due to cases such as data entry errors or ambiguous locations. While it includes full Address Validation capabilities, its most cost-effective use is as a failover service for addresses that fail our Address Validation – US service.
Developer Resources:
DOTS Address Geocode – US
This product translates US addresses into exact latitude and longitude coordinates in real time, together with census tract data, county codes (FIPS), block codes and proximity to water. It also offers a reverse location option that will return an estimated address for a specified latitude and longitude. Using numerous official and proprietary databases, it provides a 99.8% match rate accuracy for translating addresses.
When to use:
Any business application analyzing geographic data for their contact addresses, using tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), ranging from delivery route planning to market targeting and analysis.
Developer Resources:
DOTS Address Insight – US
This service combines address validation, geocoding and regional demographics in a single, convenient service. Some of the data it provides includes:
- Corrected and appended address data
- Latitude and longitude coordinates for an address
- USPS deliverability information
- Demographic information including household income by ZIP code, county and state, average housing values, Designated Market Area (DMA) and Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area codes, and much more.
When to use:
Address Insight has a wealth of applications including compliance with financial and lending regulations, consumer research, targeted marketing, assessing physical location addresses for non-USPS delivery locations, and more.
Developer Resources:
Products for Canadian addresses
Our products for Canada offer support for their unique and bilingual address requirements, linking with up-to-date address data from Canada Post as well as proprietary databases.
These include:
DOTS Address Validation – Canada
Our Canadian address validation API validates and standardizes addresses to Canada Post standards, in English or French. Using industry-leading address matching algorithms as well as auto-language detection, this service covers over 15 million addresses in all 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada.
When to use:
Address Validation – Canada is a full-featured address validation product designed to ensure accuracy and deliverability for any Canadian postal address.
Developer Resources:
DOTS Address Geocode – Canada
This product translates Canadian addresses into exact latitude and longitude coordinates in real time, together with postal code, time zone, daylight savings (DST), area code, city, province, and city population, with property-level match rates as high as 96%.
When to use:
Any business application analyzing geographic data for their contact addresses, using tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), ranging from delivery route planning to market targeting and analysis.
Developer Resources:
Products for international addresses
In addition to the US and Canada, Service Objects provides global address validation capabilities for over 250 countries worldwide.
These products include:
DOTS Address Validation – International
This product corrects, standardizes & appends international addresses to the unique requirements of each country’s postal address formats and cultural idiosyncrasies, with up to 99.5% match accuracy. With continual updates from country-specific postal authorities, our data is always up-to-date with genuine and accurate addresses.
Our fuzzy matching logic delivers exceptional match and correction rates, especially with difficult and alternative names. In addition, ISO2 and ISO3 country codes can be used as inputs, as well as over 25,000 alternate country names and variations in different languages. The service also supports transliteration for most of the 250+ countries, dependent areas and territories.
When to use:
This product is designed for address validation of international addresses. While this product does process US and Canadian addresses to the same standards as Address Validation – US and Address Validation – Canada, it is more cost-effective to use this service for international addresses outside of these two countries.
Developer Resources:
DOTS Address Detective – International
This product instantly identifies and corrects the country in your contact records, leveraging hundreds of authoritative data sources, and cross-comparing your address data to a contact’s name, address, phone, email and IP address. It provides a quantitative quality score ranging from 0 to 100 to help you determine address accuracy.
When to use:
Address Detective – International can be used to help target country-specific sales and marketing efforts, as well as help ensure compliance with global data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR regulations.
Developer Resources:
Coming Spring 2020!
DOTS Address Geocode – International
With a launch date in early spring of 2020, this product will offer latitude/longitude geocoding of international addresses and much more. Stay tuned!
