Author Archive
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.
Two Types of Online Fraud Everyone Can Do Without
DOTS Telephone Verification Steps Up Site Security
The threat from computer crimes and other online security breaches has barely slowed, never mind stopped, according to a recent survey of 538 security professionals in U.S. corporations that was conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI’s Computer Intrusion Squad.1
One such crime is online identity theft, and the two most popular ways to carry it out is though Phishing2 and Pharming3. Phishers bait you using provocative fake emails that send you to fake sites, and are successful because there is still a large part of the Internet population that is unaware of their tactics. Pharmers gather unsuspecting victims by redirecting legitimate URLs to bogus sites.
Armed with the information they harvest from consumer inputs, Phishers’ and Pharmers’ activities account for billions of dollars a year in online fraud. Companies today can play a key role in protecting their customers and themselves by fending off agents of these Phishers and Pharmers; stepping up site security and making it more difficult for them to use their ill-gotten information.
Counter online crime by integrating a live telephone verification service that communicates directly with the person interacting with your site. During a transaction, after (s)he enters his/her phone number into your Web form, the service calls or texts back with a Personalized Identification Number (PIN) that (s)he must then enter into the form before continuing on. This checks to see if the phone number is working and correct. At this point, fraudsters generally fall out. They thrive on impersonating others and doing things that can’t be traced, so, most likely, their input phone numbers will be fake and they won’t be able to complete their transactions.
Take extra measures. To guard against those that try to trick the system by using others’ phones, Service Objects’ DOTS Telephone Verification goes even further by building in optional operations you can use to identify the caller or validate the information your contact types in.
Customize your security system. You can deploy one or several operations depending on the conditions you set. For example, if you know that there is a high rate of fraud coming from a particular region, you can flag calls coming in from that region, and before delivering a PIN, without delay, check the input phone number against the listed name associated with it. You might also decide to check the contact’s geographical location or other information, such as address listing, to verify that the person placing the call is who (s)he says (s)he is.
If a phone number doesn’t match up to the person interacting with your site, set a condition and create another step in your verification process requesting further information. If the contact is truly a customer, then compliance should be no problem; but if (s)he is up to no good, this is probably where (s)he will abandon his or her mission.
CONCLUSION:
As long as the Internet exists and people continue to do business online, Phishers and Pharmers are not going away. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Internet users are duped every day. You can help protect your customers and your company by thwarting these fraudsters’ attempts to use the information they harvest from unwitting consumers.
Step up the security on your site by verifying phone numbers with a live telephone verification service that not only communicates directly with each person that interacts with your site, but also has the capacity to validate that his or her information is correct.
Verify and validate: a powerful combination that helps keep your online customers and business secure.
For more information about DOTS Telephone Verification, please visit: http://www.serviceobjects.com/products/phone/telephone-verification
1 Excerpt from Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/62002/Security_Statistics_
2 Phishing is a method of “baiting” users to give up personal information by sending out legitimate looking emails that contain links that go to fake sites designed to look equally as legitimate as the emails. Phishers are impersonators claiming to be legitimate companies (banks, popular shopping sites, etc.) in order to scam users into giving up private account information. Phishing, in a way, is similar to fishing with a net. Phishers throw their “nets” out, bait users to enter, and eventually drag in an adequate percentage of victims.
3 Pharming is more insidious in that it doesn’t just rely on bait to gather and harvest users’ personal information; even the most Internet savvy user may unwittingly become a victim. Pharmers operate by re-directing Internet users to bogus Web sites— even if they type into their browsers the exact address of their banks or other online services. So basically, someone believing that (s)he is interacting with his/her bank is actually providing the pharmer with his/her bank information, social security number and/or other private information that can be used to perpetrate a bevy of offline as well as online criminal activities.
Plug Into Web Services without Breaking a Sweat
Introducing the Address Validation
Do-it-Yourself Plugin for Salesforce.com
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
When I can get greater functionality out of my work applications without getting the tech staff involved, it makes my day. Sometimes I just need a no-muss-no-fuss solution that doesn’t require me to fill out a time and expense requisition for help. There are also times I need things done quicker than professional business manners allows for. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to confuse my enthusiasm with pushiness, after all.
I think Service Objects’ development team had people like me in mind when they came up with this new plugin for Salesforce.com. It’s so easy to install that everyone with basic computer skills can do it, and immediately start validating contact addresses, in real time, from within their Salesforce.com applications— regardless of technical background and without breaking a sweat.
Prior to the development of this plugin, implementing Address validation services required programmers with advanced programming skills, familiarity with various technologies like XML, SOAP, and web services and an understanding of Salesforce.com’s development platform as well as their proprietary programming language.
Today, no programming time or expertise is required. If you’re working in Salesforce.com and want to start validating your contact addresses immediately, then you’ve got to try out this Address Validation plugin.
To use our web services, you’ll need to sign up for a free evaluation Trial Key or purchase a Production Key for DOTS Address Validation. Use your own data with our Address validation services to compare and correct your data entries with USPS and Canada Post database information.
Download our easy 12 step installation guide and see for yourself how easy it is to install.
Reverse Phone Lookup: Token-Based Pricing Helps You Keep Your “Pot of Gold”
What do St. Patrick’s Day and a reverse phone lookup service have in common?
If the reverse phone lookup service is GeoPhone Plus from Service Objects, the answer is: a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 
An advanced reverse phone lookup service, like GeoPhone Plus, gives you the ability to identify detailed contact information for landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free numbers for both residences and businesses – all from a supplied phone number.
This is a great solution but where GeoPhone also excels is its pricing model.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
For example:
A major grocery retailer is using GeoPhone Plus to perform reverse phone lookup on phone numbers provided by their customers. They use the detailed contact data (name, address, etc) to have a better idea of where their customers are coming from to help make decisions about targeted marketing efforts and potential locations for future stores. Each time their software service requests information on a specific phone number, GeoPhone Plus hits multiple data sources to find detailed contact information for that phone number. GeoPhone Plus returns contact information on all types of phone numbers such as landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free. The type and level of contact data available varies depending on the type of phone number.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
Contact us for more information on GeoPhone Plus and token-based pricing.
Businesses Gain Marketing and Customer Insight by Appending Contact Info to Phone Numbers
You can learn a lot from a phone number. On my home phone, my caller ID let’s me know who is calling: my Best Friend or the National Survey Calling Center? With this info, I can make a split-second decision on what to do. To answer or not to answer.
For businesses, the customer’s phone number offers a different sort of intelligence. And I am not talking about your mom’s caller ID. Reverse Phone Lookup Services like DOTS GeoPhone Plus offer businesses critical data regarding customers and prospective customers. With a service like this, a phone number can provide a business with the following information:
- Residence or Business
- Residential Contact or Business Name
- Associated Address
- Telephone Provider Info (Carrier, City, State and Latitude and Longitude)
- Line type (wireless, landline, VOIP or toll free)
So what can a business do with this data? Here are just a few examples of how some of our customers are using this information:
Online Retailer
Use phone number and appended information to track potentially fraudulent transactions by comparing the appended information with the user-entered address information.
Phone/Mail Order Catalog Call Center
Auto-populating CRM and Contact Center databases: Auto-populating customer contact data reduces the chance of human error and typos while increasing the efficiencies of call center operators.
Laser Eye Surgery Center
Analyzing address and location data to determine future marketing and media spend. Having this detailed information about callers allows marketers to know where their customers and prospects are coming from to determine where to put their money for direct marketing campaigns, tv, etc.
National Grocery Chain
By collecting customer phone numbers at Check-Out, national grocery chains gain valuable insight on a store-by-store basis regarding where their customers are coming from. This helps to inform decisions about future store locations as well as targeted marketing campaigns.
How would having this level of contact information improve your business operations?
LeadsCon 2010… Its all about Quality Leads
I am out in Las Vegas attending LeadsCon 2010. THE Lead Generation Conference. After day one, the event is off to a great start. What I have noticed is that throughout the sessions, a recurring theme is Quality.
Quality Data. Quality Leads. Quality relationships between lead buyers and lead sellers.
I couldn’t agree more. The internet is rife with bad data and bad leads. And passing off this bad data as a “lead” is one of the key reasons for friction between Lead Buyers and Lead Sellers. So what is the answer?
“Keeping honest people–honest.” Contact validation is a critical component in this process. Whether you are a lead buyer or a lead seller, contact validation can help ensure the validity and contactability of a lead. By looking at a variety of data points for each contact, Lead Validation will help determine whether or not a lead should be accepted, rejected or reviewed.
The skinny on the benefits:
Lead Sellers- Improve your standings with buyers by increasing your percentage of valid/actionable leads. Demand higher price point per lead.
Lead Buyers- Only buy the leads that are the highest quality and likelihood of contactability.
Visit us on the web to see how our Contact Validation solutions can help you ensure the leads you are buying or selling are really going to drive more business to your bottom line.
Posted by: Gretchen N.
Why Cross Checking is Important When Using a Contact Validation Web Service
I have been working with web services for over 6 years now and have helped many companies both big and small to resolve their frustration with the online world of bogus lead chaos and bad affiliate programs.
With all of the information and services available to help validate your inbound leads you need to make sure that it is doing more than just a simple check for validity. There are a lot of Lead Validation services out there claiming that they are the best, but let’s really ask ourselves, what are they doing that is so unique? How will they really be able to assure you that they are catching your bad leads?
Good Question.
Need to Verify Addresses? 5 Things to Look for in a Service Provider
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:
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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.
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.
