From retail to restaurants, technology to healthcare, businesses depend on having clean, reliable data from their customers. And for companies that deliver anything to their customers, having a clean, verified address is crucial for operations and customer satisfaction. Collecting addresses from customers isn’t enough—in fact, approximately 20% of addresses entered online contain errors, be it typos, missing apartment numbers, or formatting errors. You can easily prevent these errors by adding address verification into your onboarding, shipping, or data governance processes.
Address verification is more than just validating that an address exists. It’s the process of determining whether an address is deliverable using third-party reference data, and then correcting the address if not. Once completed, you have a complete, standardized address that is mailable.
Here are the top three benefits of address verification:
1. Data Accuracy
Data is the lifeblood of a business, but inaccurate data can also be a business’s biggest obstacle. As mentioned previously, there are many ways that bad data can creep into your database, especially with manual entry. Address verification helps make sure that the address that your customer provides is complete and accurate, so that your mailings will get where you need them to go every time.
But address verification not only ensures that you have correct addresses for each of your customers. It can also help you clean your database by determining if a customer has multiple accounts in your system, and help you match them to create a single customer record.
2. Cost Savings
Did you know that Pitney Bowes estimates that each piece of undeliverable mail can cost a business up to $25? Not only does undeliverable mail cost postage and mailing resources, it can also cut into an employee’s time and could potentially damage your business’s reputation, causing you to lose customers.
Verifying an address is one of the easiest ways to save money on resources associated with returned and undeliverable mail. With proper address verification, the addresses you receive back will be deliverable, compliant with USPS and other international mailing standards, making sure you only have to mail a package once.
3. Compliance and Fraud Protection
Last but not least, address verification helps businesses meet compliance requirements and prevent fraud. Having address verification in place can help you find people who may be using fake or stolen addresses, and prevents them from hurting your business.
There are many industries that have adopted address standardization as a best practice. For example, Project US@ in healthcare is an initiative that aims to standardize patient addresses for better patient matching. Proof of address is often required in the financial industry for KYC requirements. Make sure that you’re in compliance with your industry regulations.
The best news is that address verification doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. Melissa has a wide range of Lookups that can help you simply check, verify, and correct an address, or help kickstart the process of identity verification. It can be done individually or in batch, nationally in the U.S. or globally, depending on your needs.
Our address verification tools are customizable and flexible for all businesses, available for CRMs such as Salesforce, and as cloud software, APIs, or Lookups. For more information, visit www.melissa.com or all 1-800-MELISSA. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for everything related to data quality!