The purpose of some companies is entirely obvious from their name. Like Coca-Cola. Or Domino’s Pizza. Or Dollar Shave Club.
Others are a little more obtuse. Who would have guessed that one of the first big online bookstores would be called Amazon.com – or that many of us would eventually purchase everything under the sun from it? Or that Warby Parker would become a household name for hipster eyeglasses?
We’re somewhere in between these two extremes. We do make object-oriented software tools that are often used in service environments. But that alone may not tell you a lot about what we actually do. So for the uninitiated, here is a quick guided tour of Service Objects.
First – it’s all about validation. And saving the environment
We’re best known in the industry for making leading tools for contact data validation. In short, we make sure that addresses, names, phone numbers, and email addresses of your leads and customers are accurate, genuine and up-to-date. We verify good data and correct bad data, using sophisticated algorithms and a wealth of proprietary and industry databases. It’s like having the entire world’s post offices, phone books and email lists built right into your applications.
We do a lot more than that nowadays – which we’ll describe shortly – but contact data validation is still the heart and soul of what we do. What is less well known, however, is why we started doing this nearly two decades ago in 2001.
Service Objects was founded by a mathematician and an ardent environmentalist who was upset by the amount of misdirected junk mail he personally received. Doing a little math, he realized how much of the world’s resources could be saved by having correct contact information. And while we are now a go-to resource for many of the world’s largest corporations, from Microsoft to MasterCard – and have processed over four billion transactions and counting – we’ve never lost our deep commitment to the environment.
Today – a wealth of capabilities based on data and data quality
Our flagship address validation products are still the core part of our business, providing coverage for addresses in over 250 countries and territories worldwide. But we’ve added a wide range of additional capabilities over the years to benefit your business, from providing detailed demographics to quantitatively grading the quality of your leads and orders.
These services are all accessible in a number of convenient ways, ranging from batch services for cleaning your data to API interfaces that integrate with custom and popular business automation platforms. You can even try them out live on our website before you contact us! Here is a summary of some of our most popular solutions:
Validating lead data. Did you know that 1 in 4 contact records are bad or incomplete – costing U.S. businesses $611 billion annually? We help identify bad or fraudulent leads at the point of entry, correct and maintain good leads and provide lead quality scoring to help you get the maximum ROI from these critical marketing and sales assets.
Delivery accuracy. Particularly now, in the midst of explosive growth in digital e-commerce, our tools automate ensuring accurate addresses for orders and deliveries, with features ranging from apartment level address validation to precise geo-location coordinates.
Contact tracing. Ensuring accurate contact data is more important and time-critical than ever in the current pandemic. Incidentally, we’ve also helped out on a national scale by making enhanced COVID case data available to researchers nationwide.
Fraud control. Information Age cites research predicting a 14% growth in online fraud by 2023, to the tune of US $130 billion in losses, We help stop fraud before it starts, with sophisticated lead and order validation, BIN validation of credit card numbers, and IP address validation to trace contact origins.
Compliance. Data privacy regulations continue to multiply worldwide, often with stiff penalties for non-compliance. We help verify phone line ownership and status for compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), European addresses for the EU’s strict GDPR privacy regulations, geo-targeting for lending compliance, and more.
Customer insight. Your CRM contains more than just contact information on your customers and prospects: it serves as a wealth of associated data that can help you strategize and execute targeted sales and marketing. We can enhance your contact data, by including geocoding, detailed demographic and census data, phone contact information and more.
The common denominator between all of these solutions is creating the most value from your contact data – one of the core assets of your business. You can find out more about any of these solutions, or specific individual products, by visiting our website.
Through our extensive database partnerships and sophisticated technology, we deliver contact data capabilities that few businesses could provide on their own – and back it up with bank-grade security, multiple failover servers throughout the USA, guaranteed 99.999% uptime, and responsive 24/7/365 technical support. This, in turn, is how we’ve grown to become the go-to partner for many of the world’s leading firms and the industry leader in our field.
Finally – a mystery solved
In closing, there is one last thing about Service Objects that even many of our longtime customers haven’t figured out: the acronym DOTS that we use as part of the name of each of our data quality products. What does it mean?
Is it a secret homage to one of our favorite gummy candies? A reference to an arcane technical standard? Or something we simply came up with off the top of our heads?
Actually, it is none of these things: DOTS stands for Data On Time Services. Which is the core of what we do: provide real-time data services to ensure that your contact data is always accurate, genuine, and up-to-date. Something we do better than anyone, to help your business competitive edge now and well into the future.
