Posts filed under 'General Service Objects Information'
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.
Add comment June 11, 2010
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.
Add comment May 11, 2010
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?
1 comment March 11, 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.
Add comment January 27, 2010
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.
2 comments January 27, 2010
Direct Mail Marketing Isn’t Going Anywhere Yet
While many industry experts are calling 2010 the year that will “kill marketing as we know it”, some feel that we shouldn’t be so quick to write off some of the good ole’ tried and true methods. I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal that further convinced me. The article, “Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing” talks about several companies who made a shift away from their direct mail campaigns and found their business suffered direct losses from eliminating this type of communication with their customers and targets.
Direct mail marketing can still prove to be a very effective way to reach customers and prospects. Especially for small businesses with a unique offering who are looking to stand out and continue a dialog with their audience. I think the main issue with Direct Mail though is that it needs to be done smartly, with consideration that people are constantly being bombarded with messages, offers and promotions through other mediums. Direct mail should not equal waste. It should not be a waste of time for the recipient, environmental resources or budget dollars.
Businesses who plan to use Direct Mail as a part of their marketing efforts in 2010 might consider committing to make their campaigns more effective and less wasteful by putting in place “greener mail” initiatives. Each year, the US postal service attempts to deliver billions of pieces of mail that will never reach their intended recipient due to being undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA). Using tools that verify and standardize addresses is a quick and cost effective way to reduce the impact of direct mailings.
Check out our best practices tip sheet “Greener Mail: 6 Tips Simple Tips for More Eco- and Budget Friendly Mailings” for more information.
Posted by: Gretchen N.
Add comment January 13, 2010
Service Objects and Asterisk, Together at Last!
As a new member of the Service Objects team, I have learned an amazing amount in the last four months. I came on to help Service Objects with System Administrator duties, and there have been many interesting projects for me to work on from simple help desk tasks to installing new production server equipment to improve our customer’s experiences.
One of my favorite tasks has been configuring our new phone system. When I started here at Service Objects we were using an old analog system that, although operational, was starting to show its age. I promptly got started on a new open source platform called Asterisk, which has made us much more digital. Although we still retain our analog lines for incoming calls, we are now able to use our Internet connection to receive calls as well, ensuring that we are always available to our customers.
Many people here at Service Objects have been a part of this project, with Rachael and Marissa helping with the logic and recording the IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Alen and Geoff testing the hardware, Alex helping with some needed programming, and everyone else by providing feedback on how calls are working and sounding.
As a result of our experience with Asterisk, Service Objects is now exploring a whole new family of telephone verification tools. For example, our developers are already creating new DOTS Telephone Verification services to decrease the number of fraudulent transactions for our customers.
Moving forward I am excited to expand our Asterisk footprint beyond our in-house systems. Hopefully my experience with Asterisk will help our customers verify telephone numbers seamlessly – and in real-time – directly through our DOTS Web Service framework.
Thanks for reading this week!
Curtis J.
Add comment July 28, 2009
“Do I Need a User Name and Profile to Access your Web Site?”
When we launched our new Web site earlier this year, we added a feature that allows users to sign in and register with us. Now when you visit our homepage you will notice a green “+” icon in the top-right corner of the page. After clicking on the icon you can begin creating your new user profile. Creating a user profile is not necessary, and you will still have access to most pages on our Web site…
…BUT
…You will lose out on all of the great benefits our Web site has to offer if you do not register! Registering with us allows you to receive additional online lookups, download sample code, sign-up for XML trial keys, or submit sample test batches. The best part about it is that it is all FREE and their is no obligation or credit card information required! Hurry up and register with Service Objects today.
One more thing…
If you are a current client or DOTS Trial Key user, you can use this link to log-in and check your transaction usage. This is completely separate from your user profile and log-in information. You will need your current production and/or license key and the email address associated with your key to sign in.
Thank you for reading this week and we look forward to seeing you on our Web site!
Will E.
Add comment July 21, 2009
Excited About DOTS Web Services!
As the spokesperson for our Marketing Department, I can say in all honesty that Marketing gets really excited when a new product is launched. Our wheels start to turn thinking about all of the new sponsorships and opportunities we will have to advertise our newest DOTS Web Service, while increasing brand awareness at the same time. Right now, DOTS GeoPhone Plus has us excited because it is a revolutionary real-time service, filling a great void in the market place. On that note, I am happy to announce the release of DOTS GeoPhone Plus!
So what makes DOTS GeoPhone Plus so exciting? Personally, I find our newest service to be both exciting and impressive because it combines 3 of our key products (DOTS GeoPhone, DOTS GeoPhone Wireless, and DOTS Phone Exchange) and combines them all into one comprehensive solution. I can not tell you how often we hear requests for a product of this kind, so it makes us smile to see it come to fruition and fill the market demand for this type of service.
I encourage you to check out DOTS GeoPhone Plus on our Web site, and try a few lookups of your own by visiting our Lookups page. Hopefully you will find our new product as interesting as I do 
Thanks for reading this week,
Dara F.
P.S. DOTS GeoPhone Plus will also be the topic of our newsletter this month so don’t foget to sign up to receive our newsletter or visit our Newsletter Archive.
Add comment May 28, 2009
The Heart and Soul of Service Objects
To our wonderful clients and thousands of users who click on our Web site each day, Service Objects is a B2B company that provides real-time validation and fraud prevention solutions. But behind it all we have a great team of awesome individuals that not only love to help our clients, but love to help our community as well.
When Alen is not working around the clock to ensure absolute up-time for our clients, when Ryan is not explaining to Project Managers how DOTS Lead Validation can protect their affiliate lead gen projects, and when Jonas is not inventing new logic algorithms to combat the ever-evolving forms of online fraud, you will find Service Objects helping those in need.
At Service Objects social responsibility starts at the top with our executive team. On any given day you may find them serving our community by fixing bicycles on Earth Day, caring for pets during the recent evacuation of the Jesusita fires, or mentoring some of the young adults in Santa Barbara.
Giving back is part of our company culture and is the heart and soul of Service Objects. We are a lifetime supporter of the Humane Society, offer pro-bono licenses for public education, help Angel Flight West transport terminally-ill patients to receive medical care, and donate to local organizations in the Santa Barbara area.
At Service Objects we’re not all about business. We are in the business of helping companies reduce online fraud and validating contact information, but we are also in the business of helping people and giving back.
Thank you,
Marissa B.
Add comment May 22, 2009
