Posts filed under 'Technical Information'
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:
(more…)
Add comment February 10, 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
DOTS Address Validation FAQ
Figuring out the basics of what DOTS Address Validation does is simple — messy address comes in, clean address comes out! And yet of all our services we probably get the most questions about DOTS Address Validation. Here are the most common:
Add comment April 10, 2009
How Postal Workers Handle “DPV Invalid” Addresses
Recently, an artist in the UK named Harriet Russell sent out 130 letters… to herself. While this may at first sound like narcissism, it was actually an artistic test of the Royal Mail service. Not satisfied to state plainly her address, she instead left cryptic visual puzzles, clues, and diagrams for the delivery staff to solve. Take this “address”, for example:
Remarkably, only 10 such letters failed to get delivered! With the modern increase in email usage, automated customer service lines, and online web forms, it’s easy to forget that our physical mail is still handled by real people, who can often make sense of… unorthodox address standards.
Obviously in practice, businesses can’t send mail to invalid addresses and expect them to be delivered. This is where Delivery Point Validation or “DPV” comes in. Addresses that are not DPV valid are basically just addresses that have not been registered with the United States Postal Service “USPS”.
What often causes confusion with Service Objects’ clients is that sometimes a mailbox can physically exist, but if it is not registered with the USPS, it is not considered “deliverable”. More often than not, the issue isn’t a completely bogus address, but rather an address that simply doesn’t fit USPS expectations. For example:
Line 1: 123 Anywhere Street
Line 2: Around back of the building
City: Springfield
[...]
This address might be flagged as a valid street location, but since Line 2 is clearly an unofficial location, it will probably be flagged as having an invalid mailbox or unit number and is therefore not DPV valid.
Luckily, as Harriet Russell demonstrated, this doesn’t necessarily make the letter undeliverable in a practical sense. The postal worker will still deliver to the correct street address, and will probably even try to deliver the package “around the back of the building”. If the unofficial Line 2 item can’t be found, then the package will be left at the main address.
In conclusion, always keep in mind that a human is behind every delivery. As a general rule, although this very much depends on if and how you are using a Service Objects’ DOTS Web Service, we recommend a “customer knows best” policy. If you are provided with a mailbox that is technically not DPV valid, include it anyway! It’s likely that the package will just get delivered to the main mailing address if it really is incorrect.
Thank you for reading this week’s post!
-Donnie K.
Questions for Donnie K.? Email him at communications@serviceobjects.com.
1 comment November 5, 2008
Service Objects DOTS Web Services Availability
In this first blog, I’d like talk about the availability of our DOTS Web Services. I know Service Objects has this topic covered on our Web site, but I would like to give you more detail.
For our LIVE (production) customers, Service Objects maintains two (2) data centers on opposite coasts for maximum data protection. Each of these state-of-the-art data centers feature multiple diversely routed fiber optic connections to the Internet using Tier 1 backbones, redundant power supply via battery backup (UPS systems), and diesel generators. Our primary data center is located in California, with our backup data center located in New York. The backup data center is used for failover and troubleshooting purposes only. You can read more about our failover solution for production users here.
Both of Service Objects’ data centers consist of multiple, load balanced Windows and Linux servers. Load balancing is stateless and is performed by redundant Cisco content switches. To achieve maximum uptime, all of our servers and switches are redundant, and use redundant equipment.
Service Objects has worked diligently to build a solid and reliable system that we can be proud of. You can rest assured knowing that DOTS Web Services will always be available- 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Thanks for reading,
Alen D.
Questions for Alen D., our resident IT Genius? Email communications@serviceobjects.com.
1 comment September 24, 2008
