Your customer contact data is one of the most critical assets for your business. And like most things in life, it requires regular maintenance and care to retain its value. Over time, customer contact data naturally changes due to various factors from internal data entry errors and CRM updates to customer-driven life changes like promotions and job changes, relocations and even intentional fraud. Moreover, data quality in general has become a global problem today, costing US businesses over $3 trillion annually.
When it comes to customer mailing addresses, the risks of bad data are higher than ever. Incorrect, invalid or fake addresses can lead to missed deliveries, customer dissatisfaction, brand damage, losses due to fraud and more. Fortunately, there is an automated solution to ‘address’ this problem.
This blog explores how Customer Data Validation, an integrated approach to ensuring your customer data is genuine, accurate and verified, can help your business deal with incorrect or invalid addresses in your customer and contact databases.
Customer Data Validation and your address data
Customer Data Validation goes beyond simple verification; it is an integrated four-level step process to ensure the reliability of your data. Depending on the specific type of contact data, the steps include fundamental integrity checks of basic customer data, augmenting and extending data points associated with the customer data, analyzing cross-connects between these data points, and providing quality signals that score a customer record’s overall quality and accuracy.
In the case of address data, Customer Data Validation tools from Service Objects combine validation with valuable information such as:
- Deliverability data and address corrections
- Appending data such as ZIP or postal codes
- Address-based geocoordinates
- Updated USPS addresses for moves and changes
- Data entry guidance down to the apartment or suite level
This is accomplished through a customizable set of individual tools that can be tailored to your specific business needs, each of which can be easily integrated with your ecommerce and business platforms using convenient API interfaces. Some of the Customer Data Validation tools available for processing address data include:
DOTS Address Validation – International : This flagship product verifies, corrects and appends addresses to ensure deliverability, with accuracy to the apartment or suite level, including formatting for postal discounts. It validates addresses in over 250 countries, with correct postal formats and language support.
DOTS Global Address Complete: Automates address entry by allowing users to quickly select an address via auto-suggest as they start typing, reducing keystrokes, misspellings and incorrect address entry. The result is improved accuracy and smoother e-commerce checkouts, with cart abandon rates reduced by up to 30%.
DOTS NCOA Live: Checks for up-to-date address changes for US addresses in collaboration with the USPS’s continually updated National Change of Address (NCOA) data.
DOTS Address Geocode – International: Appends precise rooftop-level latitude and longitude coordinates to global address data, for business and location intelligence, compliance purposes and more.
These tools combine with appropriate data hygiene practices, such as verifying and correcting addresses at the time of capture and performing regular address validation on historic data before mailing marketing campaigns will ensure accurate address data is captured and maintained.
Learn more from our free white paper
Of course, there is more to your customer data than just mailing addresses – Customer Data Validation can ensure that ALL your contact data is genuine, accurate and verified. Want to learn more? Download our free white paper Customer Data Validation: When Accuracy Matters, or better yet, speak with one of our friendly data quality experts for a free, no-pressure consultation. We’re here to help you get the most out of all your business’s customer data assets.
