Service Objects, Inc. has been standardizing and cleansing even the messiest of USPS valid addresses for years. The core purpose of our DOTS Address Validation-US service is determining if addresses are valid based on their ability to receive mail. However, we’ve occasionally come across addresses that were known to be good but just not known by the USPS. In recent months, we’ve been working on alternative data sets to identify addresses that may not be mail-able but are in fact known to exist. DOTS Address Detective was pegged as the perfect landing spot for these hard to find addresses.
Address Detective, is a sleuth service that can do many things to help with the messiest addresses by using other data points like: name, business name, phone number, etc. One of its operations, FindAddressLines, doesn’t even require the normal clean address1, address2, city, state, zip format. Rather, it analyzes client input and determines the best match for each element. Clients with very messy data sets, unknown data sets or even corrupted data sets can repair and validate addresses with this operation.
One of our most recently added operation’s, FindOutlyingAddresses, was created to help with those hard to find addresses that are not known by the USPS. They may be general delivery areas where only the Post Office is known or they might just be way out of the way, disconnected from most communication. Mammoth Lakes, CA is a well known major General Delivery area. Mail is not delivered to individual houses but to the community Post Office.
Although Address Detective is great for these hard to find addresses, DOTS Address Validation is still the best choice for most users for most addresses, returning the most robust data and needed data points. Which is why we also needed a clean way to help our clients of Address Validation know when they should go to check the FindOutlyingAddresses operation. Its likely they will only be doing it a very small percentage of the time.
In order for our current clients to gain this insight without having to reintegrate a new operation or service, we have added an error type that will return only if the client wishes to see it. This new error type of ‘5’ will be linked to the clients key and will only activate if requested.
The address: 3 Oak Tree Way, Mammoth Lakes, CA, 93546 is one of these addresses. In Address Validation this error would be returned:
But from our new operation, we can see that the house exists and is known. It’s a “Premise” level match meaning we found an exact match for the house.
With the new error message, a client will still get an error but it will be of type “5” meaning we know there is some sort of match in OutlyingAddresses that will provide more information about the address in question.
The normal error messaging will still apply for any address that we do NOT think is a good match for FindOutlyingAddresses. For example, the address: 200 Greenwell Lane, Santa Barbara, CA, 93105 is out of range but we also know that it will not be found by Address Detective.
This new operation is a good way to see what we may know about an address if it can’t be found by normal means.
If there are any addresses you have in question contact us, we’re always interested in researching what we can find to help improve your business processes!
