Why do people use our DOTS Address Validation – US product? There are many reasons to choose our service that really depends on your business or project. At the highest level, our clients have a goal of gaining efficiency in their systems and want to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. The next question becomes, how are we going to create efficiencies in our client’s systems?
The primary solutions Service Objects’ real-time APIs offer typically fall into one of these general use case categories: preventing lost deliveries, eliminating waste and fraud, standardizing for compliance, gaining insights into customers and prospects and optimizing marketing automation. These categories are relevant to the majority of our APIs, however, this blog will focus on Address Validation – US and give examples of how this service can be your solution.
Preventing lost deliveries (and delivering more)
Address Validation – US can help with lost deliveries, and in turn allow for the successful completion of more deliveries, by guaranteeing accurate validated addresses. We do this with our CASS certified address validation engine which employs the culmination of 20 years of experience. We make sure addresses exist and are complete by fixing addresses and returning codes that give you additional details and visibility into the addresses at hand.
For example, besides just telling you what was fixed, or telling you what address component is missing, we will provide insights into the address and let you know if it was found to be vacant, returning mail, general delivery, rural route or highway contract and many more, which you can find in our developer guides.
With this information, your organization can make smart decisions on how to handle addresses and reduce the costs of delivering, re-delivering, handling, lost materials, materials sent to the wrong addresses and the cost of damaging your reputation.
Eliminating fraud
Fraud can manifest itself in many ways, and it is always important to keep in touch with new ways that this kind of abuse is attempted. There are several ways Address Validation – US will help eliminate fraud.
Some fraud is attempted by creating duplicate orders in an effort to either get free samples or try to get multiple orders of something and in turn try to resell them. The people behind these efforts will try to circumvent processes by entering their data into a system multiple times, each time entering the data slightly differently. These differences may include a misspelling on purpose such as using ‘Summerland’ and ‘Summer Land’ for the city, or entering the wrong street suffix such as ‘ST’ instead of ‘RD,’ or using both in separate instances. The changes or variations are usually small enough to create multiple different addresses that end up being, in fact, the same address.
Sometimes deliveries are made to multiple forms of the same address. Alias street names can be completely different even though they are the same street, for example, Highway 28 and Allen Street are the same street. Whatever the address inputs were, if the underlying address is actually the same, we can identify these duplicates in two ways. First, we return a standardized address that eliminates the variation in addresses, and second, we return a barcode digit unique to the address that can also be used for de-duplication.
Besides altering addresses to get multiple deliveries, fraud can come into play when someone has stolen purchasing details and needs to receive the delivery of a fraudulent order at another location. In some cases, the perpetrator will use the address of a vacant lot or an address with no delivery and wait for the mail to arrive. With the notes (detailed in our developer guide) that we return in the service, those kinds of details can be identified and flagged for review. In any case, an area found to be problematic or suspicious can be detected and flagged as well.
For instance, if your organization is having trouble with deliveries in certain regions or territories, ensuring the address you have is valid and accurate can help you flag addresses appropriately by getting correct the address, city, county, state, district, building type, delivery type and so on, where leaving these items not validated could lead to potential fraud. The cost savings in making your process less prone to fraud can come in many forms such as saving on delivery, handling materials, producing materials and protecting your organization’s reputation.
Standardizing for compliance
Compliance is a huge issue for most businesses nowadays, and it can be costly to be out of compliance. In recent years, lawmakers in various countries including the US have enacted compliance laws with respect to the gathering, handling, and storage of personal information. Not being in compliance with these new regulations can have a huge impact on your organization in terms of financial penalties and reputation damage.
When a request is made to purge personal information, organizations need to be able to identify all of the personal data connected to this individual and be able to purge it with certainty. One way we can help is by making sure the data you have on an individual is valid, accurate and standardized. In this situation, all three of these are equally important.
Take standardization as an example, if the same address is entered into your system with several different variations when it comes time to purge the data some of the data may be missed based on differences in the address. These variations can come from typos on forms, a call center technician misinterpreting information conveyed over the phone, or even data digitized through processes such as OCR that scan hard copy documents to digitize them for processing by computer systems.
Our Address Validation – US product helps solve these problems. First, it performs the address validation so that you can be sure that the address you have is valid and accurate. Second, it standardizes the address so that organizations can rely on consistency, and they can use our barcode digits to identify duplicate addresses even when the original addresses had variations to them. (Of course, various people can live at a single address, so care has to be taken in properly identifying, individuals at an address and making sure the wrong records are not being purged.)
Our address validation service is a huge step in untangling this problem, but we should also point out that we have other validation services, To untangle data points even further our DOTS GeoPhone Plus service and others can help. The costs associated with being in compliance are minuscule to what they can be when dealing with litigation, data handling, and reputation issues.
Gaining insights into customers and prospects
Gaining insights into your customers and prospects from your data and having a more complete picture of your leads can give you many strategic advantages. As an example, imagine being on the phone with an engaged prospect, trying to relate to them by telling them about an experience you had in their home town, just to hear them say “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, I’m not from there.” That’s embarrassing! Getting this wrong can make you look contrived.
We can increase confidence when you are reaching out to contacts with valid accurate data, but we are also giving you an opportunity to hone in and paint a better, more complete picture. What congressional district they are in can give you insights into potential political leanings. Is their address residential? Is it a rural address? Do they live in an apartment? Is it a military address? We address these kinds of questions and help shape the relationships and outreach organizations have with their contacts. Moreover, delivery strategies can be tailored to be more efficient. For instance, depending on the insights provided, deliveries can be distributed to the appropriate delivery team or person, scheduled for the right times and/or charged the proper amount.
Having a complete picture allows you to be able to not only distribute leads accurately to the right teams but also allows you to create unique territories that in turn match your strengths as a sales team. Leads can be distributed loosely or tightly. The human resource cost in handling leads and gaining insights into your customers and prospects can be tremendous, as are the costs in trying to correct the data manually. Service Objects is here to help you out with greatly reducing that burden.
Optimizing marketing automation
Just as creating smart sales territories are important for lead distribution, they are just as important in marketing territories. When distributing marketing materials, it can be important that they are tailored and are sensitive to the target audience and location. It is also important to deliver materials to addresses that exist so that you can reach as many people as possible, and make your campaign a success with a minimum of waste. Employing Address Validation – US as part of your solution can help minimize costs such as human resources, corrections, time, and delivery and re-delivery, as well as the implied costs to your reputation.
This is far from an all-inclusive list of use case categories. We have 23 other validation services besides Address Validation – US. Just imagine the possibilities when you pair this service with our other validation and data enrichment services like:
- reverse-lookup phone
- geocoding services, including longitude and latitude coordinates
- demographics
- email validation
- name validation
- IP validation and
- lead validation services.
Depending on your organization, one or more of these can be part of your solution in gaining maximum efficiency and reducing waste, fraud and abuse.
