Service Objects Weblog

Need to Verify Addresses? 5 Things to Look for in a Service Provider

February 10, 2010

Nearly every company doing business on the web today can benefit from performing simple validation and verification against the contact forms on their website. Each piece of customer contact data has the potential to hinder a company’s business processes if the information is inaccurate, incomplete or fraudulent. Perhaps the most key–and often most inaccurate–piece of information captured is the postal address.

Research shows that performing validation and verification on addresses can help businesses improve deliverability and shipments, reduce overhead spent following up on bad data, and reduce waste associated with Undeliverable Mail and over-production of direct mail pieces.

A quick search for Address Verification or Address Validation on a search engine like Google™ will yield pages of results for companies offering tools to validate and standardize postal addresses.

So how does a company seeking to improve communication with customers and reduce their direct mail waste, choose the right service provider?

Here are 5 important things to look for in an Address Verification or Address Validation service:

1) Data Quality
How often is the data updated/refreshed? Off the shelf software packages—those that are provided on a CD which you install—are not typically updated on a regular basis. Address data changes all the time and can go stale within weeks or days. Look for a service provider that is web service based – so it provides updates automatically and often.
Is the vendor certified? Seek vendors that can prove they have auditable data quality. Most contact validation providers can provide third-party certification of their data’s accuracy and matching techniques.
2) Ease of Integration
Make sure the service provider uses open industry standards like XML, HTTP, SOAP and WSDL. Confirm that sample code and access to a testing platform are readily available. And even better, use a vendor who will let you try their service for free. That way you can test to see how easily it will integrate into your current business processes.
3) Data Security and Privacy
Does the contact validation provider have a published privacy policy that ensures the data that you and your customers submit will never be captured, sold, rented, or shared with a third-party? Choose a vendor that is willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement and committed to protecting your privacy.
4) Availability and Redundancy
The key components you want to look for are:
-SLA- should be 99.995% available
-Multiple Data Centers for maximum data protection and redundancy
5) Flexibility
When getting started with Address Validation initiatives most businesses have 2 problems they are trying to solve. They have a backlog of customer data that needs to be verified and they have a need to ensure new data coming in is accurate and complete. Look for a service provider who can offer bulk batch validation to get your project off the ground and offer a real-time web service as a secure and available way to verify each new contact at the point of entry— your web forms.

Visit us online for information on about Address Validation and related Contact Validation solutions at www.serviceobjects.com.

Entry Filed under: Address Validation Services, Product Information, Technical Information. Tags: Address Validation, Address Verification, Address Verification Web Service, Contact Validation, E-commerce, Retail, Undeliverable-as-Addressed, USPS, Verfiy Address, Web Service.