Author Archive
Failover of Contact Validation Services, Ensuring the Continuous Flow of Your Data
Many companies talk about up-
time and service level agreements that look great on paper but don’t perform up to customer expectations in a crisis. A good backup process, covering application software, is necessary and should be standard, but it’s not enough.
You need an architecture that provides failover from a primary server, to a back-up server. It should pick-up and provides the same service, with minimal interruption in the flow of data to your application. This is more complicated, and valuable, than a mere backup of the application or even load balancing. Proper failover can minimize the interruption of access to your contact validation services. For mission critical and business critical applications this involves automatic failover to a fully separate alternate location. This dual datacenter level of failover protects against single datacenter failure of servers, LAN and WAN network access failure and physical location failure modes such as fire, power, or natural disruptions.
When considering real-time contact validation services for a business application, where continuous uptime is critical, here are some things you should look out for:
- Live backup servers that perfectly mirror the live primary servers, they should be identical both in count and content
- Multiple datacenters, one hosting primary servers and the other backup servers, located in different locations of the country, if a disaster takes out one data center, or the network access, it should not affect the other
- 99.95% uptime, with assurances that both datacenters have never gone down at the same time
- With the application and content exactly the same in both production servers, doing a failover should be as simple as changing the URL from one server to the next. For example, you would code your application to automatically failover from the URL of the primary server to the URL of the back-up server based on a condition such as response timeout
- In the event of massive datacenter failure, your contact validation provider should redirect traffic to the backup server at the backup datacenter
- XML code should contain failover suggestions and any support team should be able to help their clients implement failovers
Having a data response failure in your live application, that utilizes contact validation, can mean unexpected losses as your customers usage of that applications disrupted. If a company is accustomed to having validated contacts imported into their CRM system or used in some application from their website, a loss of service, even temporary, can lead to corrupted or non-corrected data. Failure of your contact validation processes can cause sales people to waste effort following bogus leads or packages to be delivered to bad addresses, all of which could be avoided if the contact validation provider offers a business critical level of service as noted above.
Delivering Ease of Use and Versatility
Contact Validation Made Fast And Easy: Most of us have become accustomed to instant gratification and fast accurate results. This is a high standard that Service Objects is constantly on the cutting edge of for contact validation. Our real-time services are second to none, yet we do have customers that want and need even faster service in some instances where they need to run small batches. In response to our customers’ requests we have developed a product called the DataTumblerTM, a desktop application that can run contact validation batches, up to 5,000 records, while accessing Service Objects’ database of 3 billion contact records in real-time.
EASY AND VERSATILE DATA CORRECTION: When it comes to using the DataTumbler it couldn’t be easier. No programming, no bothering IT or the Web manager, just run on any PC. Customers can use the same Trial Key or existing Production Key for their desired web service in the DataTumbler or our XML and batch products. The DataTumbler is free to download from our website and installs itself at the click of a mouse. Once data has been entered or imported into the DataTumbler, and a batch has been initiated, there will be a prompt to enter the key to run the batch. Want high security, use the SSL encryption feature. Within a short time all the data will be validated and ranked with easy to understand outputs, with the same quality as our real-time XML product outputs. The results can be exported into a CSV file.
DataTumbler Desktop Validation Output
SUGGESTED USES: The DataTumbler is perfect to run sample batches to test data, establish metrics expected for new input formats, do address geocoding, verify email, post tradeshow lead validation, clean-up a CRM , or refresh old data for sales call lists to name a few.
Addition of 103 Million Contacts Improves Contact Validation Accuracy
New Enhancement Will Improve Your Contact Data Accuracy for Reverse Phone Lookup and Lead Enhancement and Scoring.
Traditional consumer data sources such as Directory Assistance are offered by typical industry vendors to lead aggregators, retailers and company’s dependent on contact information, as a way to improve match rates and viability of collected contact information. This way of improving contact data is becoming less and less of a viable solution by the day. These Directory Assistance dependent sources suffer from weak, incomplete and missing contact data (see examples below). The problem continues to worsen due to the ongoing shift in land line vs mobile phone usage, long update time-frames for carrier client data, and limitations on use of carrier client data.
What can you do?
Service Objects offers a number of web service based products that utilize numerous public and proprietary data sources containing over 400 million phone records, and utilize a proprietary scheme of cascading logic to resolve caller identification data as a way to maximize match rates and contact data accuracy.
We now take the next step in helping you improve your contact data.
Service Objects has improved the accuracy of DOTS GeoPhone, DOTS GeoPhone Plus, DOTS Lead Enhancement Plus and DOTS Lead Validation web services with the addition of important new name and address data. These services are now utilizing a proprietary database of verified consumer records with enhanced and alternate name and address information. This new database contains 103 million contact records.
This new database allows Service Objects DOTS Web Services to enhance phone lookups by accurately overlaying missing elements such as name and critical address fields such as apartment, suite, floor, and unit numbers, onto partial contact records.
This important addition of data greatly improves the completeness and accuracy of contact data information. See the example below.
Example: Improved Accuracy and Completeness
Without the enhanced data providing expanded and verified name information and the addition of the actual apartment number this contact data is confusing at best and probably useless for the purposes of lead creation, retail shipments, postal contact or any application that needs name and contact data integrity.
These DOTS Web Services enhancements are now an integral part of the products as of May 2011 and available for you to enhance your contact data.
Email to Phone: From your Email Server to SMS Gateway Servers
Beware—Sending Emails to Wireless Devices Has Its Pitfalls
More and more people are using cell phones with SMS features these days. In fact, text messaging is becoming the number one means of electronic communication in the United States. This may seem like a ripe opportunity to reach out to people via their hand-held devices and put your products or services at their fingertips, but for businesses, it may not be the right thing to do.
Although the concept of emailing your campaigns to mobile phones is alluring, unless your contacts have specifically asked to receive messages this way, you may be putting your company at risk of getting blacklisted, fined, or perhaps worse, alienating customers and prospective customers.
For one thing, it’s the recipients that get billed for your messages; they may find this not only annoying, but costly, escalating annoyance and provoking them to contact their mobile phone service providers to complain. If you systematically send out unsolicited emails via SMS gateways, and mobile phone companies receive enough complaints, you may be prohibited from accessing their networks in the future.
For another thing, the FCC has strict guidelines within its CAN-SPAM Act1 , mandating that all emails, whether bound for email inboxes or wireless devices, must have a feature that allows recipients to easily opt out of future mailings. While Smart phones recognize live links, other phone types don’t, putting your company in violation of a federal law and potentially exposing you to up to $16,000 in fines for each violation.
Don’t fool yourself: If you think that everyone would gladly pay to hear about your latest and greatest, the coolest and the newest thing, think again. One major Mobile phone company learned this the hard way, when in 2005, UCAN2 brought a case against it for spamming its customers and then charging $.10 for each message.
You can prevent violating CAN-SPAM regulations, avoid potential penalties from consumer protection agencies and protect your reputation by simply cleaning your email list and removing SMS gateway email addresses. In fact, isolating SMS gateway addresses is a good idea even if you’re not worried about getting blacklisted, fined or irritating people, for the simple reason that many cell phones can’t display html (formatted) messages.
There are hundreds of domain names (and growing), specific to cell phones and pagers, that email marketers should avoid. How do you spot them? Use a real-time Web Service like DOTS Email Validation that continuously updates its database of wireless domain names, and flags email addresses that are known to use SMS gateways. To test a few email addresses on this service, go to DOTS Email Validation Lookups and see for yourself.
If you’d like to test a list of email addresses, try our free-trial batch processing or sign up for a live XML free trial key that lets you integrate the service into your own system and try it out for 30 days. See the table below for just a few known SMS domain names to look out for:
| @cingular.mymobile.com @mms.mycingular.com @mms.mycingular.net @pics.cingularme.com @sd.cingularme.com |
@sd.mycingular.net @sms.bluecell.com @skearthlink.com @cookmail.com @edgesend.com |
1Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act
2Utility Consumers’ Action Network, non-profit, pubic interest consumer advocacy
E-Commerce: Calculating the Right Sales Tax
How to Keep Up With Changing Local Sales & Use Tax Rates
“Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.” ~Max Baucus
Since the beginning of the year, 25 different cities or counties in the state of Arkansas have had changes in their sales & use tax rates. In Texas, the state tax rate is 6.25%, but many cities and counties in the state may add up to 2% to that for a total maximum combined rate of 8.25%. Washington State has over 350 different tax districts. In fact, take a look at any U.S. state or Canadian province and you’ll find a host of tax-rate fluctuations and variations.
How do ecommerce sites handle the complexity of so many local tax rates and keep up with the continual tax changes that occur throughout the year?
Unless their shopping carts are customized, more than likely, they aren’t. Many people using standard shopping carts are not calculating the local-level sales tax rates. Instead, they use their shopping carts’ built-in state-level sales & use tax tables. Many people might not know that standard shopping carts do not calculate local sales tax rates. They provide single tax rates per base region (State).
Pros and cons of using a standard shopping cart:
- Pro: Easy integration; low initial setup costs.
- Con: May leave a company with a hefty tax bill at the end of the quarter.
By only charging standard state sales tax rates, and not specific tax rates based on the locations of sales, it means that at the end of each quarter, companies must account for the missed local revenues and remunerate each tax jurisdiction within each state in which they have sold goods.
Adding customization
One way around the problem of standard shopping carts that only calculate single sales tax rates per state is to customize it to include location-based tax calculation.
- Pro: Your cart is set up to handle US and Canadian local sales & use tax rates
- Con #1: Setup is time consuming and tedious. Customizing a shopping cart to calculate local taxes is no trivial task. It requires searching each state’s individual tax districts and then creating tables to include all of the various city and county sales & use tax rates.
- Con #2: Sales & use taxes rates often fluctuate throughout the year, and new tax districts are often added as cities grow or become incorporated. This means that ongoing research and updating of your tax tables are required.
Opting for Automation
The better solution? Use a tax lookup Web service that provides the current sales & use tax rates without requiring any further effort from you. A Web service is simply a software system that supports machine-to-machine communication over a network: your shopping cart and a remote server that hosts the service.
With a tax lookup Web service in place, each time a customer makes a purchase, the Web service invokes an operation to calculate the most current tax rate based on the customer’s location. It’s a no-muss-no-fuss solution that allows e-commerce companies to focus on their products and sales rather than committing IT resources to building and continuously updating a system that can often be had for a minimal monthly fee.
DOTS FastTaxSM is one such system. It’s one of the leading tax lookup Web services because for pennies per transaction, it offers the most current tax information for every county, city and state/province in the United States and Canada; and once a month, the FastTax development team is hard at work updating the FastTax database with the most current tax rates, painstakingly gathered from disparate resources.
What makes DOTS FastTax stand out is the developers behind it that are committed to accuracy, and their experience in dealing with contact verification issues. DOTS FastTax is designed to calculate sales tax based on customers’ exact locations which is preferred over a simple ZIP/Postal Code lookup, since postal codes may run across more than one tax district. DOTS FastTax does provide a ZIP/postal code lookup operation that can be used if an address is not available to you, or as a failover if the given address is invalid.
Having an automated system in place to calculate sales tax in your shopping cart is a smart solution for e-commerce companies because, more than just saving time and money, it saves you from the aggravation of having to deal with the complexities inherent in calculating and keeping current with all North American sales & use tax rates.
DOTS FastTax is the Web service of choice for many online companies because it provides the most current sales taxes per customer locations, with an available ZIP/postal code lookup. So, while tax complexity itself is a kind of tax, by using DOTS FastTax, you can free yourself from those imposed by your shopping cart.
Examples of Real-World Applications using DOTS Contact Validation Web Services
XML Based Web services were developed with the goal that computers using different environments could communicate and exchange information. At Service Objects, Inc. our commitment to satisfying this objective continues with the implementation of our Web services supported through various languages and environments. It is our goal to simplify the implementation of our services and present real-world scenarios to illustrate its viability in business applications.
We’d like to present two of our newest examples that show how easy it is to integrate our Web services with 3rd party applications:
1. See Batch Email Validation Example Using Microsoft Excel
This example provides a useful tool for performing validation of large email lists through a simple one click interface.
2. See Google Maps / DOTS Address Validation Plus Mashup Example
In this next example, we have used the output of our DOTS Address Validation Plus US service as a parameter to the Google Maps API. Using DOTS Address Validation Plus not only provides mailbox information but also provides geolocation data as well.
How Technology Can Help Close Online Sales and Keep Customers Coming Back
Not another marketing theory: Read how technology works on the issues that may be limiting your sales and/or damaging your online reputation.
Successful e-commerce companies have three things in common: Good online reviews, reasonable delivery fees and prompt delivery of goods. Web services can help you streamline delivery rates and assure your products are delivered on time: key ingredients for keeping customers in your online sales process and inspiring them to leave positive feedback in return.
Streamline Rates
Has this ever happened to you?You find the perfect product at the right price, only to find out that the shipping rates nearly double its price? If you’re like me, then you click out and search for another place to buy your product. We’re not unique in this. Some studies estimate that up to 75% of all shopping carts are abandoned before sales are closed, and report that the #1 reason is high shipping rates.
Why are some shipping rates so high? Location is the first thing that comes to mind; but then there’s that dreaded “handling” fee that often inflates the cost.
Companies can often keep people like us in the sales process by simply tightening up on distance calculations, thereby reducing “handling” in the sales and shipping process. This is something that can easily be done by integrating a hosted Web service that provides them with the information and automation needed to make it happen.
Take, DOTS Address Geocode, it’s a Web service that pinpoints customers’ exact locations the moment they’re typed into online forms; companies can use this information to offer delivery rates based on actual distances rather than geographic zones.
Assure Deliverability
While DOTS Address Geocode pinpoints customers’ locations, it also cleans up their addresses, fixing things like ZIP codes and left-out apartment numbers, for example. It can also push the clean customer data into sellers’ CRM systems. That means less “handling” via no re-keying efforts and fault-free delivery.
Undeliverable mail accounts for billions of dollars of waste in the US alone, and some of that comes back to you and me, combined in “handling” fees associated with reprocessing bad deliveries.
Undeliverable (or late-arriving) purchases also account for the majority of online complaints when it comes to rating customer experience.
To sum it up, pinpointing exact customer delivery locations and cleaning up addresses to assure deliverability help you not only in your efforts to reduce handling fees, but also in building and maintaining your online reputation.
Offering better value and better customer experience drives more loyalty and ultimately more revenue to online companies. Good reviews attract people like me to initiate business with online companies in the first place; reasonable handling fees inspire us to stay the course and complete sales processes; and quick deliveries on our purchases gets us to leave positive feedback in return.
DOTS Address Geocode Pinpoints customer location and assures address deliverability while instantly updating the seller’s CRM system. It’s a simple solution to help online sellers offer better bottom-line prices; streamline sales and shipping processes and keep customers coming back and/or sharing their positive experiences.
Happy Birthday Microsoft Office
In a few days Microsoft Office will turn 21. It’s used in 80% of all businesses with only 8% using alternatives like Oracle StarOffice, Google Apps, and Lotus Symphony. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we thought it would be appropriate to develop some new code samples that integrate DOTS Web services with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.
MS Office offers a great development environment as well as a great set of applications (Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint). The new examples we created use the latest in .NET technologies to validate email addresses, correct postal addresses and look up sales tax rate information, all within Excel. We’ve provided the source code too, so developers can easily integrate and customize DOTS Web services into their Office applications.
Our new Excel examples enable developers to transparently leverage the power of DOTS Web services directly from within their Microsoft Office applications: after programming in the desired functionality, they can easily distribute the enhanced Office documents to their team, using 100% native Microsoft Office functionality.
So, Happy birthday, Microsoft Office, and thank you for making it possible for companies like us to design products that enhance your core functionality. DOTS Web services are now compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, versions 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010.
More IP Data Means Better Insight
Service Objects has significantly improved its Web services. For the last year, users of Service Objects’ IP validation and lead validation Web services have been seeing an increase in the number of International IP addresses. In the past, these IP addresses have been extremely difficult to pinpoint with a high degree of certainty; but thanks to newly available International IP data, this situation has improved.
The new IP data adds about 850,000 new IP records and has effected change for over 250,000 existing IP records. Highlights include linking IP address data to over 500 cities in India and Europe for which the mapping was previously unknown.
These new IP records will help improve the accuracy of DOTS IP Address Validation, DOTS Lead Validation, DOTS Lead Enhancement, and DOTS Lead Enhancement Plus; thereby reinforcing our customers’ efforts to accurately verify and weed-out fraudulent online transactions.
Does Email Validation Help Catch Bogus Email Addresses?
A lot of people ask what an email validation system really does and if it really helps catch bogus email addresses.
The short answer is, it weeds out good email addresses from bad. However, all email validation systems are not created equal. Some help and others don’t.
A standard method is to use server-side scripting on Web forms to verify that emails are input correctly; it’s easy to defeat this method though by simply typing in anything@whatever.com.
With a standard email validation system, this example passes muster because it has a name, an @-sign and a TLD (Top Level Domain. Ex. .com, .org, .net): Not so with an instant, advanced email validation Web Service. If you’re in e-commerce, or any business that’s dependent upon correct email information, you’ll need more than server-side scripts to weed out bogus email addresses.
An advanced email validation Web service uses tricky algorithms to quickly identify bad information within email addresses. Think of an email validation Web service as an online x-ray device that sees through an email address’ basic structure to identify shortcomings that are not obvious by mere observation.
While standard email validation falls short in identifying bogus email addresses, advanced email validation goes the extra mile and does a pretty thorough job. An email validation Web service checks for things like: does the domain really exist? If it does, does it have rules for allowable domain names? Can it contain numbers, vulgar terms? Does the mailbox even exist within that domain? What about the SMTP server?
- Read Six Things Every Email Validation System Should Do in Service Objects’ Hot Topics, How Does Advanced Email Validation Web Services Work and How Do They Compare to Standard Email Validation Scripts?
- Check out DOTS Email Validation Web Service. Use the online demo or sign up for a free 15-day trial.
