Think about the last time you moved. You probably notified your relatives. And the DMV. And your most important creditors. Did you also notify every company that send you mail? Probably not.
This is why the contact data in your Customer Management System goes stale so quickly. According to recent statistics, nearly 31 million people – nearly 10 percent of all Americans, and roughly 15 million households – moved in the United States in 2019. Over 80 percent of these moves are either individual, family or corporate moves, and three million of them are interstate.
This translates to a major source of preventable data decay for any Customer Management system. In this article, we’ll look at an automated solution for keeping US clients on top of these address changes – our DOTS NCOA Live service.
Harnessing the power of USPS for address changes
The best way to keep your address database current is to go right to the source: the US Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOA) data. NCOA Live simultaneously cleans and validates addresses and directly runs them against the USPS NCOA database, ensuring your address data is correct and up-to-date.
Some of its key features include:
- A lightning-fast API interface that can process up to 100 customer records per second
- The freshest change-of-address data, powered by weekly updates directly from USPS
- SSL-based transaction encryption for data security
- Compatible with most Customer Management Systems
In addition to maintaining accurate mailing addresses, NCOA Live’s use of USPS NCOALink meets the requirements of the USPS Move-Update standard, helping qualify your mailings for Standard and First-Class Mail discounts.
Why an API-based service is better
NCOA Live has a distinct key advantage over tools that verify a batch list of addresses: it can be implemented directly in your Customer Management system to validate correct addresses at the time of data entry, as well as cleansing legacy data at the time of use.
NCOA Live is unique because its application programming interface (API) allows developers to integrate new mover information directly into their application. This allows you to cleanse contact records directly within your software/application while avoiding the error-prone process of extracting addresses, transforming them, and loading them back into your database. NCOA Live’s real-time API validates and updates recent move information for your business and residential contacts, so you can be sure you have the most accurate contact information in your Customer Management system. Its adaptable design provides your team with the ultimate flexibility to build contact cleansing routines to meet your business needs.
Talk to the experts
When it comes to working with USPS data, experience matters as much as technical capabilities do. We have been the experts in address validation for nearly 20 years, with over 4 billion transactions and counting validated, making us the go-to choice for many of America’s largest corporations. More importantly, we have the technical and support expertise to help you seamlessly work with USPS requirements and your Customer Management system for a smooth implementation.
All of our data quality services come bundled with expert implementation support, available 24/7/365 technical support, and the industry’s only financially-backed 99.999% uptime guarantee. Want to learn more about how NCOA Live can keep your addresses correct and up-to-date? Try it out for free on our website, look at our extensive technical documentation online, or contact our friendly product experts anytime to discuss your specific needs.
