Improving Call Center Operations with Global Address Validation

Improving contact accuracy for a global business

This particular firm was a US-based company with a major overseas presence, including multi-lingual call center operations serving Europe, Asia and other countries worldwide. Its largest markets are overseas, requiring them to maintain customer support operations in multiple countries as well as dedicated shipping centers serving Europe. After the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, this firm saw a need to quickly streamline the call volume coming into their European customer service associates (CSAs) and reduce their overhead.

In their case, this meant adapting a leaner operation to accurately capture customer contact data across the multitude of postal formats used in different countries, without impacting their marketing, shipping and customer support operations. Global addresses vary widely in accuracy and specificity, based on the country and its postal system, and their couriers have very specific requirements for shipping label addressing. As a result, having clean, accurate, validated addresses represented a real impact on their operations, in areas ranging from delivery accuracy and call volume to fraud prevention.

Choosing a flexible automated solution

It became clear to this company’s management that address validation would play a key role in managing this transition. Given that their CSAs were working from home, it was not clear what their capacity was going to be as the pandemic raged on, so they needed to look at cutting down as much of their overhead as they could. One of the steps in that was validating address data when new users would sign up and create a new online web account, linking with shipping and other functions.

When past efforts to automate address validation did not produce the needed results, this firm investigated Service Objects’ Address Validation – International and discovered that it sounded “almost too good to be true.” They investigated further, tested the system with sample data, and found that it worked extremely well for them. Now this has been fully integrated with their European operations, and as they move forward with their own data migration efforts, are using this capability for other applications as well.

A relationship built on service

Beyond their cost savings and productivity gains, this firm felt that their customer service experience with Service Objects was a key factor in rolling out a successful implementation, singling out its flexibility with testing requirements, its friendly and knowledgeable technical staff, and the responsiveness of the entire company, noting that “every person (we) have interacted with has been great to work with.” At a technical level, they also noted that while Service Objects was always happy to offer expert assistance, its API interfaces were very straightforward and easy to implement.

Currently their Address Validation – International implementation has made a real impact on key outcomes such as call volumes and their rate of returns, the latter of which has slowed down considerably. In the future, they plan to expand the range of services they use to support them as their business continues to grow. We are looking forward to helping this firm deliver quality products and provide excellent service to its customers for many years to come.