Consistently high inflation is encouraging organisations to ensure they generate the best value from their spend. This is particularly the case when it comes to their data quality efforts.
For those looking for best value data quality, particularly with regards customer postal addresses, it’s vital to use technology that has access to postal operator address data.
Organisations must avoid those companies that scrape the internet in search of address data and usually rely on address interpolation. This is where missing addresses are ‘best guessed’ by the data they do have. For example, “if we have an address at number 6, and number 10 there must be addresses for 7, 8, and 9”. This way false positives could be added to the database because there might not be addresses for 7, 8 & 9. Postal operator data does not do this, it only uses ‘true’ values.
Address accuracy powered by postal operator data
Those with postal operator certification such as CASS (US) or SERP (Canadian) certification deliver the very highest quality of address data because they meet the stringent quality rules that organisations such as USPS provide. Therefore, when dealing with a market like the US where there are more than 200 million postal addresses, it makes sense to select a provider that can demonstrate they have the certifications in place to properly qualify address data.
Postal operator address data is refreshed, revised and maintained daily. Every day in the UK as the Royal Mail delivers the mail it is also noting changes that occur from building and demolition and feeding back into their systems to ensure the address database is up to date. A web-scraped address database doesn’t have access to this level of accuracy.
Those that don’t source a provider of postal operator data as part of their address cleaning efforts will experience their products and communications either not being delivered quickly, or not delivered at all – leading to a poor customer experience. Also, businesses will be faced with a costly returns process and be required to spend more by investing again in cleaning their database.
For fast, efficient deliveries and effective communications, such as direct mail, organisations must use address verification and cleaning technology that has access to global postal operator data to deliver clean, correctly formatted addresses in real-time. Something that’s more important than ever in these inflationary times with, for example, postage costs increasing rapidly around the world.
SaaS data cleaning tools
Due to the evolution of software as a service (SaaS) in the data quality area, it’s never been easier or more cost-effective to manage data quality in real time. Today, it’s possible to source a scalable data-cleaning SaaS platform with access to postal operator address data which requires no code, integration or training. We offer such a platform called Unison. Organisations can simply plug in and benefit immediately.
Such a service instantly cleanses and corrects names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers worldwide. A single, intuitive interface provides the opportunity for data standardisation, validation, and enrichment, resulting in high-quality contact information in real-time across multiple databases to help engender customer loyalty and efficiencies. It can also be accessed via web API and on-premises software.
All of our data quality products and services have access to postal operator address data from around the world and are able to cleanse held customer address data in batch on a regular basis, and at the customer onboarding stage, in real-time.