We were recently talking with a prospect and they asked if we could show them what our Lead Validation products look like.
The answer? It is up to you.
That’s the beauty of API-based products like ours, they are built to be flexible and easily integrated into your marketing automation platform, CRM, ERP, web forms, databases, and so on. What they ‘look like’ has more to do with how you use them rather than how they are built.
The power of APIs
Earlier application programming interfaces (APIs) required custom technology, protocols, and often costly implementations to deploy, manage, and operate. In the last decade, APIs have become commonplace, building on existing web technology, to securely allow applications to exchange data efficiently.
With our API products, for example, you can instantly check and correct an address against the entire United States Post Office database – or determine an incoming lead’s quality score based on an analysis of over 130 data points – or power up your customer database with geographic or demographic information to better target your contact efforts. And much more.
An example: Lead Validation
Our DOTS Lead Validation service takes your incoming leads, verifies and cross-checks the validity of its various data points, and returns a quantitative quality score from 0 to 100. In addition, the service literally has hundreds of outputs and values that can be returned for each lead validated. The outputs, with your business logic, can be used to perform any number of functions – for example:
- The lead’s email address can be flagged as invalid in real-time. This allows you to message the end-user for correction at the time of data entry, or perhaps reject the lead.
- The country corresponding to lead’s IP address may not match the address given, allowing you to flag this lead as potential fraud and route it for further processing or rejection.
- Using the same output, you can also determine that this lead has a high ‘OverallQuality’ score and use business logic to send to your top-performing sales team.
- Conversely, you can route low quality leads directly to a nurture campaign, or simply not work the lead.
This is just a small sample of how one of our services, with its many outputs, can be used to drive multiple business logic based rules, from the front end to the back end of your business process. With validation, we build the tools and you design the rules to meet your needs. We have found it easier to answer ‘what does it look like’ with ‘what do you want to solve’?
Once we understand what you are trying to accomplish, we can suggest a service and logic to help meet your need. Many of our customers build multiple solutions from the output of a single API response.
Our API tools and your business rules – a perfect match
Service Objects API tools deliver results in real-time, are extremely flexible and secure, and output a number of different data points, measures, and scores. With an understanding of these outputs, you can build business logic that meet your needs, as well as control what the end-user experiences. You also have the option of involving UX experts and designers in the looks and performance of the front ends you build these tools into.
Here are some of the advantages of using API-based data quality tools:
- You get results in real-time, which allows real-time use cases. For example, when a prospect enters a ‘bad’ email address in your online form, our DOTS Email Validation product can flag this and allow you to message this prospect – allowing them to correct it while they are still completing the form.
- Many of our services have multiple operations, which in turn may have multiple output, each of which can contain a number of variables
- Services have multiple outputs that you can build business rules around – and you can even build multiple rules around the same or different outputs, with just one call to the service.
- API interfaces allow you to build these tools directly into your business automation platforms, for a seamless user experience.
Our 26 products are designed to meet a wide range of needs, from data validation to data enrichment and more. They can help you target your marketing and sales efforts, avoid fraudulent transactions or ensure compliance. And, of course, make sure your contact data is accurate, genuine and up-to-date.
Understanding the outputs and the potential values these services can return enables you to understand what kinds of business logic you can build – and sometimes create ideas for business logic that you may have never thought of. Developers guides are available for each of our products right on our website, allowing you to explore the possibilities 24/7 with no registration required.
Need more ideas or implementation advice? You make the rules, but we are here to help with the tools. Our experts are happy to learn about your business goals, pain points and needs, recommend best-of-breed solutions, and help you quickly deploy them.
Contact us anytime to learn what we can do for you.
