Name Validation
It’s very important in a lot of ways – it’s one of the easiest ways for someone to provide fake information on a web form but can be very tricky to properly detect. Take this example of a real piece of mail:
More processes that accept this sort of data are being run by computers. Less often human eyes review as the entire process from start to finish is becoming fully automated.
Name validation can be easily overlooked as an unnecessary addition, but the ramifications of making mistakes can be far reaching. Small mistakes can be very embarrassing, larger ones can lead to a big PR black eye for a company if a very embarrassing mistake makes its way onto the internet.
What’s going on behind the scenes
At Service Objects, we are always looking for ways to improve all data inputs at the point of entry, and name validation is no exception. We have millions of known first and last names from around the world and algorithms honed over years of work to weed out oddities in names. We are looking for celebrity names, vulgar words, words from a dictionary and things that just plain look like garbage or bogus. We constantly strive to improve our algorithms and take pride in identifying fake names.
In the example above it seems obvious that the name is bad, but to an automated process is it safe to say this is bad? What about a valid name such as Martita Boobier, which contains questionable words? What about something like Letit Boobra which doesn’t appear vulgar but also doesn’t appear to be a valid name as well? The goal of DOTS Name Validation is to properly place these names into the appropriate category to take the worry out of an automated process improperly placing them.
Avoid adding bad names to your CRM in real-time
Bad names such as “Trucker Bob”, “Doctor Nick”, “Homer Simpson”, and “Felix the Cat”, names that don’t appear to be names such as “The Big Bang” or “Service Objects”, or names that just appear to be complete garbage such as “Asdf Blah”. DOTS Name Validation can properly identify many cases that might otherwise slip through the cracks without proper review.
