Archive for January 27, 2010
Service Objects Customers Benefit From Seventh Straight Month of 100% Availability
At Service Objects, our commitment to contact data quality doesn’t stop at the data services we provide. Availability and access to that data is critical to our business and our customer’s businesses. Ensuring our data is available “on-demand” is something we take very seriously. For the seventh straight month, we are pleased to report 100% Availability of our DOTS Web Services.
To monitor the performance and accuracy of our services we use several automated quality assurance tools. Our motto is to test the accuracy and speed of every service, every operation, every hour, every day: 24/7/365. On a typical day at Service Objects we perform over 2,000 internal self-tests on our delivery network for a variety of systems. We also utilize 3rd Party systems to monitor true uptime, application availability and performance of our DOTS Web Services as an additional, impartial test. One of these 3rd Party systems is AlertSite.
“External monitoring is essential for measuring and understanding customers’ experience of today’s applications, which often includes a number of participants in the application delivery supply chain,” said Ken Godskind, Chief Strategy Officer for AlertSite. “In providing full disclosure of their AlertSite metrics, Service Objects offers admirable transparency to the users that count on their services.”
AlertSite is a hosted provider of Web performance products. AlertSite maintains 40 monitoring stations in data centers on every continent but Antarctica. They ensure and provide independent analysis of our DOTS Web Service Network to track and verify our systems are always available and running at peak performance. Using AlertSite, we test our data as often as every five minutes from multiple cities around the globe. Real-time alerts are generated and logged if page errors or performance problems occur. Service Objects is the only provider of contact validation web services that uses an independent third party to corroborate the company’s performance and fulfillment of its Service Level Agreement (SLA).
“Third-party monitoring of our network, applications and performance is critical for maximum reliability”, said Geoffrey Grow, CEO and Founder of Service Objects, “not only does AlertSite give us the confidence our network is running worldwide, it also independently ensures we are meeting or exceeding our Service Level commitment to our customers.”
Since 2006, Service Objects has published its monthly performance reports to demonstrate our networks perform consistently at the preferred levels. Click here to view our archive of Performance Reports from AlertSite.
Posted by Gretchen N.
January 27, 2010 at 3:20 pm serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
Lead Validation ROI in Plain English: Save Thousands per Month; Get 5.8 days ROI
A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that when filling out web forms less than 40% of those surveyed provided accurate phone number and custom information—such as address—all of the time. The reality is most people are reluctant to give up their precious contact information when doing research or filling out requests for information. More often than not, the data is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent.
Where does this leave marketers, sales managers and lead generators? It leaves them sifting through mountains of contact data with the hope of isolating the true and valid leads that will bring more revenue to the bottom line. According to the Direct Marketing Association, 93% of marketers cite contact data quality as one of their most important issues.
Implementing a lead validation or verification solution is one way marketers and business managers can improve lead quality in real-time and at the source, and ultimately save money by shifting focus to high scoring leads, fixing questionable leads and discarding downright bad leads. 
Do the Math-
Here is a simple calculation showing where businesses save money by validating their leads:
Let’s say your business generates 100 leads per day or around 3,000 per month. 20% or 600 of those leads turn out to be bogus or bad leads. If your telesales team spends around 5 minutes per call and calls each lead an average of 3 times before qualifying and discarding bad leads, that is 15 minutes per lead. At $23/per hour that’s about $5.75 per lead—or $5.75 wasted on pursuing a lead that was ultimately determined to be bad. Multiply that by the estimated 600 bad leads per month and that’s $3,450 per month wasted telesales resources. Using a service like DOTS Lead Validation℠ will validate leads in real-time, before they arrive at telesales, and costs only about $.22 per lead or around $678/month for 3,000 transactions.
That is a savings of $2,772/month-with an ROI on the use of the Lead Validation solution in about 5.8 days.
In a nutshell, lead validation works by:
Validating whether the contact information is real. Is it a real address? Does 100 Main Street actually exist in the zip code provided?
Verifying that the contact name or business is associated or linked with the address, phone number and even IP Address provided.
Correcting address, city, state, and email elements as needed to make the lead data as complete as possible.
Scoring the lead based on the quality of data. Estimating the quality of data entails not only a check on data correctness as entered but quality as established through a method of proprietary checking and sophisticated cross correlation of supplied data with other data sources. An overall score is provided based on the quality of the pieces of contact information such as name, business name, email, IP address, phone number and street address. Recommending that you Accept, Reject or Review the lead.
Download our case study for more details on how DOTS Lead Validation can save your business money today!
Posted by Gretchen N.
