Personalization has become an important part of marketing for businesses across industries, but getting personalization wrong can have serious consequences. One of the easiest ways to personalize a message is to include a customer’s name—in the subject line of an email, in the salutation of a letter, etc. If you’re not careful, however, this can backfire, because no one likes being misidentified.
It’s easy to think that your name data is always accurate. After all, most names stay the same for long periods of time, some for an entire lifetime. But what about when someone gets married or divorced? Maybe someone is from a different country and naming conventions are different, or there’s confusion about which field has the first and last name. Or maybe someone entered a fake name into your database.
Name verification will verify that a name is real or not real, and is a good stepping stone for whatever your next data quality step is—whether that’s simply storing data accurately or as one part of a longer identity verification process.
Because names change, name verification does not happen from a static list, like it might for email or phone validation. Instead, Melissa has a large knowledge base of global names and naming conventions that is fluid. If you put in a name associated with a specific country, we will be able to parse more accurately (ex. If ‘Señora’ is the first word in some countries, it would be flagged as an honorific instead of a first name).
In this database, we also have a large list of cultural names and vulgarities. Some names might be flagged as valid but need extra checking because, for example, it's a celebrity name. Names will also be flagged as vulgarities. It is up to the company how they want to decide to move forward with them—sometimes, they may want to keep names that may be valid. Other times, it might be easy to decide to discard them.
Melissa can also do all this with business names.
To hear more insights on name verification, check out Melissa’s 10 minute microwebinar on Global Name Verification, hosted by SD Times, featuring Tim Sidor, a DQT analyst at Melissa.
This microwebinar is part of a five part series - make sure to check out the next one on optimizing your phone data potential, available now!
Learn more about Melissa’s Name Verification solution on our website, or call 1-800-MELISSA. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for everything related to data quality!