We have many mission-critical applications for our products. But every year in May, one of the most critical ones is keeping moms happy on Mother’s Day. After all, customer satisfaction is important in any industry, but no one EVER wants to disappoint their mom on her special day.
Do you know how many flowers are sent every year on Mother’s Day? A lot! This ‘very technical’ answer comes from my first-hand experience as a teenager. When I was young, my girlfriend’s parents owned a floral shop, and Mother’s Day was the biggest day of their year. It took us all week to prepare orders and plan deliveries.
A more precise answer comes from the Society of American Florists: one article notes that Mother’s Day flower sales were nearly $2 billion US in 2016, edging out Valentine’s Day by volume and representing 64 percent of all gifts to mom that day.
What you might not know is that Service Objects plays a major role in the logistics of Mother’s Day. Delivering perishable floral products on a specific date, with little margin for error, is a complex challenge requiring bulletproof data quality. We serve many important customers within the floriculture and floral industry and wanted to share some of our tools they use to help make moms smile all over the US.
How We Power the Flowers
Here are some of the key tools our customers use to help ensure a successful Mother’s Day:
Address Validation. Integrating our DOTS Address Validation – US product within your order entry process makes sure that the Mom’s address is correctly captured at the time of ordering. This is particularly important for a holiday like Mother’s Day, where addresses are not generally being entered by the recipient and are more prone to error.
Our Address Validation service matches and, where possible, corrects addresses in real time at the point of data entry, using up-to-date USPS and proprietary databases. Our USPS CASS-CertifiedTM database engine also flags residential versus business addresses and returns a full ZIP+4 postal code.
Delivery Point Validation (DPV). This feature is part of the output from Address Validation, and it is critically important when a third party enters the address: Delivery Point Validation ensures that an address is not only correct but also recognized as being deliverable by the USPS. A simple example is knowing that a unit number is required for a multi-unit building and flagging the address as incomplete.
Address Geocoding. Sometimes a delivery address isn’t a mailing address. For example, a rural address may not be recognized as deliverable by the USPS (because its mail goes to a PO box or general delivery), but it still corresponds to a real, physical location where Mom actually resides and other delivery services can reach. Our DOTS Address Geocoding product can determine the latitude and longitude of a delivery address with up to a 99.8% property-level match rate accuracy, ensuring that flowers get delivered to the front door, as well as, helping delivery drivers with efficient delivery route planning.
Address Detective. What happens when an address is incorrect or undeliverable? When it is being entered by a well-meaning but down-to-the-last-minute, hasty son, too often it could result in a lost sales opportunity. Our DOTS Address Detective saves many of these sales by using fuzzy logic with available data points to correct and append address data for “bad” addresses – so that Mom still receives her much-deserved bouquet.
50 Million Mothers Can’t Be Wrong
With an average of almost $40 per person spent on flowers and delivery, Mother’s Day is more than just a day of recognition – it is big business, serving roughly 50 million customers in just one weekend. It has come a long way since US President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation for the first national Mother’s Day in 1914.
We are proud to play a key role in ensuring the delivery of all these flowers every year – after all, we love to celebrate our moms too.
And we have a present for you too: a free access key that lets you try out 500 transactions for any of these or other capabilities in your own applications. Want to learn more? Contact our friendly and knowledgeable product team and we’ll take it from there.
Happy Mother’s Day – Mom ?
