Autocomplete capabilities have become ubiquitous in online applications nowadays. From Google Maps to local service providers, more and more web-based forms now autosuggest addresses as you start to type them in. And it’s no secret why: they can reduce the number of keystrokes you need to type in an address by 80% or more, and provide a much smoother user experience.
On the other hand, if you are looking to add this to a business application – particularly in e-commerce – you have to choose carefully. Many autocomplete apps lack critical features that impact the accuracy, productivity or quality that are critical for business needs. But the right product can offer dramatic improvements in productivity, address accuracy and customer satisfaction.
This is why we recently published a new whitepaper report, How to Select an Address Autocomplete Tool. Naturally, it provides an introduction to our own new autocomplete product, DOTS Global Address Complete. But more importantly, it provides a checklist of what to look for in business-quality autocomplete capabilities, including many key issues that people might otherwise miss.
What makes an autocomplete solution business-grade?
Several capabilities – which are not always part of common autosuggest applications – are critical for providing the accuracy, ROI and seamless user experience needed for business and e-commerce applications. Some of the key ones we cover in detail in our new whitepaper include:
Rapid response time. Keystroke productivity depends a great deal on the speed of application response, and more importantly, how quickly it produces geo-relevant addresses in response to user input.
Integrated address validation. This is a huge competitive differentiator, with real consequences for applications such as product shipment. Suggested addresses may not always mean deliverable addresses, particularly in cases such as user input error or non-postal addresses.
Global reach. If your customers lie outside of the United States, your application needs to support the countries where you do business – and make it easy to select these countries when needed.
Sub-premise level accuracy. This is another make-or-break factor for business applications: many autocomplete applications do not suggest addresses at the suite or apartment level, impacting productivity and deliverability.
Integration. being able to quickly embed these tools within your own applications, using connectors such as API interfaces, is an important consideration for implementation.
Cost. Particularly for high-volume applications, you want to check whether a solution charges by the keystroke (as users are typing) during the query, or upon submission of a selected address.
This whitepaper also provides business use cases, facts and statistics about address capture, and a detailed discussion of capabilities to look for in your own product search.
Introducing Global Address Complete
We also introduce Global Address Complete, engineered from the ground up for business and e-commerce, and designed to reduce cart abandonment by up to 30% and improve delivery accuracy. It provides real-time type-ahead suggestions from the first keystroke, response times as fast as 100 milliseconds, address accuracy to the apartment and suite level, and support for addresses in over 250 countries, as well as integrated CASS-certified USPS address validation.
You can test-drive our address autocomplete service right on our website and see for yourself! And for a deeper dive, contact us for a free trial license key. Like every Service Objects data quality service, this application also includes expert implementation assistance, available 24/7/365 technical support, and guaranteed 99.999% uptime. Check it out, and discover an easy upgrade for your address data entry accuracy and productivity.
