What is DOTS Lead Validation – International?
For over a year now, Service Objects has been validating leads around the world with DOTS Lead Validation – International. This service looks at six key components – name, business, email, IP address, mailing address and phone – testing, analyzing and cross-comparing each to build a certainty score of 0-100 indicating the reliability of the given data.
Lead Validation – International can be used for any type of data quality need, be it validating data in an online web form or shopping cart, cleaning up a CRM or other database, passing leads through a marketing automation platform or just running against a list. It can be integrated with any major programming language, and is compatible with all of the major CRM and automation systems.
Lead Validation or Lead Validation – International?
Lead Validation – International is the global successor to our US and Canada based service, DOTS Lead Validation. Both services generate a lead quality score using our strongest data sets and algorithms to validate and cross-compare key contact data components – name, business, email, IP address, mailing address and phone. Lead Validation – International was built from the ground up with a new interface, tests and datasets. Once this new service was up and running, we circled back and upgraded the US and Canada service to take advantage of this new interface and engine.
For the purposes of validating US and Canadian leads, Lead Validation and Lead Validation – International will return the exact same results. Choosing between the domestic or international service really comes down to your needs and the mix of international leads in your data set. Since the results for domestic leads will be the same, we generally recommend using Lead Validation – International for most lead validation where any international leads may be captured. To make it easier, the new interface is shared between both services so switching from one to the other requires only a minor update to the request URL and a new license key for the other service.
What’s new in Lead Validation – International?
The power of Lead Validation – International continues to grow as we refine our algorithms and add new international datasets. Processing international data is still one of the most challenging things we do at Service Objects, due to the logistics of getting and working with international data sources. Our latest Lead Validation – International update includes more attention to identifying questionable phone numbers, weeding out reserved phone numbers country-by-country, and looking for combinations of phone numbers that are likely to be invalid.
Additional tests have been included in the logic that cross-compares the input and component country information. These new tests allow for better resolution in validating the consistency of leads data by allowing us to check from a few new directions. Above all, the main reason for this latest update was to upgrade how we handle problematic countries.
How does Lead Validation – International deal with problematic countries?
As mentioned, the primary motivation for the recent Lead Validation – International update was to help one of our clients deal with a large uptick in potentially fraudulent leads from questionable countries, that traditionally appear at the top of generic, drop-down country lists, such as Antarctica, British Indian Ocean Territory and Aland Island. The first two have almost no population, while the latter has a small population.
Prior to this update, we considered these unsupported countries. Because it was unlikely that these leads were actually genuine, and a choice of these countries should cause them to be flagged for further scrutiny, the service would return a quick error and not charge the user for the request.
A deeper dive into example data surrounding these leads suggested that quite a lot of fraud takes place using these countries. It seems likely that many leads selecting these questionable countries are coming from automated sources, like bots. Often these leads have additional data points that do not match up well or are clearly fraudulent. Our service is well suited to identify these cases.
What’s next for Lead Validation – International?
Our engineers are constantly refining all of our services, including Lead Validation and Lead Validation – International. The current solutions are great tools and we continue to improve their processes for dealing with problematic countries or whatever the next challenge. We are constantly evaluating and adding more accurate and reliable data and while improving and refining our algorithms to detect questionable leads, businesses, and suspicious input in general.
These are just a few of the things we will continue to explore to help Lead Validation and Lead Validation – International continue to meet your needs. If you have feedback or questions regarding our Lead Validation services, get in touch with our team.
