Why Melissa is Your Trusted Provider
Melissa Team | Uncategorized |
The internet has become an essential tool for buying and selling products, supporting and contacting customers, and all-important know your customer or KYC compliance. All these crucial functions rely on basic sanity checking of customer data to prevent fraud, lost shipments, support anti-money laundering (AML) and keep data clean. To facilitate the speed of modern commerce, checking data input into web forms in ‘real time’ is best performed by using a Web API and sending a secure request to validate and correct addresses, check an identity, and confirm phone, email and other data reference checks.
When making decisions on what provider to trust for the all-important data quality service, it becomes necessary to check the software provider’s security, service levels and industry certifications. When evaluating vendors, be sure to evaluate the whole picture –reviews from customers, postal agency certifications, approval from regulatory bodies, future-proof capabilities, and even whether the company is growing into new markets.
With privacy and security being major issues of the day, it is important to understand the implications of processing Personally Identifiable Information or PII. It may behoove organizations to ensure the vendor processing the PII maintains compliance with major security standards, and can be held accountable for the caretaking and provenance of critical data assets during the data quality process.
Here is why Melissa meets all of the criteria outlined above.
Exceeding Industry Standards of Compliance
In the financial services industry, company-wide SOC 2 Type II audits are required to be conducted on an annual basis. These audits evaluate and test the company’s processes, procedures and controls through an independent accounting and auditing agent that is AICPA authorized. SOC 2 Type II is the corporate industry standard for an overall control structure to manage business continuity and disaster recovery programs, privacy, audit trails and established roles. It also affirms the long-standing commitment to strong controls and safeguards for handling and processing data. In evaluating a vendor’s compliance with SOC2, the trust-service principles of confidentiality, privacy and security are the most important as they showcase the vendor’s ability to execute safeguards on PII. Melissa holds Type I and Type II SOC 2 Certifications that ensure the trust principles of security, privacy and confidentiality can be measured and controlled.
Vendors that have achieved compliance with all data security standards outlined in the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) are certified to handle PII. Healthcare providers, financial institutions, government agencies and third party data vendors that deal with PII, are required to meet the most stringent data security guidelines of HITECH by Unites States law. Only a vendor that can measure and attest to the strict controls to keep patient information private and secure by HITECH is one that can be used for the processing of PII and issue Business Associate Agreements that establish responsibility for patient information. Melissa holds HIPAA and HITECH certifications, and is in the process of mapping all controls to the HITRUST standard.
Melissa is trusted by more than 10,000 clients worldwide in key industries like insurance, finance, healthcare, retail, education, government, etc. Companies like Mercury Insurance, Convenant Care, GE Healthcare, FTD, Car2Go and Delta Faucet, power data quality operations with Melissa tools.
Hold U.S. & International Postal Certifications for Address Quality
Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) is provided by the United States Postal Service to test vendor software to ensure that the accuracy of address coding is performed to the 99.9% quality threshold. It helps businesses keep address data clean and standardized. When Delivery Point Verification (DPV®) is applied to CASS processing using USPS® authoritative reference data, it certifies that an address can actually receive mail (is deliverable) and is valid up to the suite number. All address verification solutions for the U.S. should, at the very least, be held to this basic standard – and not verified by generic map data.
PAVE is a software certification performed by the USPS to determine the accuracy in presorting address files for bulk mail services. Since presorted mailings are so quick and easy – and therefore cost effective for the Post Office to process – the savings are passed on to the mailer, saving 46% off the cost of Standard Mail.
NCOALink processing is used to update movers in a file. Processing mail through NCOA reduces undeliverable mail pieces and eliminates undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail. Melissa, a full service provider certified by the USPS, adheres to the highest standards of trust when executing this critical data quality function. Melissa also provides Change of Address processing for Canada – certified by Canada Post – and for 10 additional countries in Western Europe such as Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland.
In addition to USPS® CASS/DPV, Melissa also holds Canada Post SERP, RoyalMail® and EIRCode certifications for address verification in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. These certifications are used as the benchmark of quality when evaluating data quality vendors. Melissa leverages the highest quality postal sources when performing address validation. So, the coverage in each country is optimal to ensure delivery and power batch cleanup of customers, real-time data entry, and ensure shipments from ecommerce applications. The map generated data that is used by many as a short cut for address verification, does not meet the premise level verification of a quality vendor like Melissa.
Offer Uninterrupted Service & 24/7 Tech Support
Melissa is devoted to making sure your business stays up and running. We operate numerous redundant, distributed server farms across the world – each with Failover backup and certified by website monitoring firm, Alertra, for a 99.99% uptime. Beyond the 99.99%, Service Level Agreements (SLA) are also available for clients as needed and include 24/7 tech support.
The quality, integrity and security of your data is Melissa’s number one priority. The standards we hold ourselves to exceed the expectations that our customers set for us. That’s why we’ve been a leader in data quality since 1985 – adhering to strict compliance regulations and setting the industry precedence for accuracy. Since our inception, more than 10,000 customers worldwide, and across all industries, have depended on us to handle the most sensitive customer data and chosen us as their trusted provider. To learn more about our services, please visit Melissa.com or call 1-800-MELISSA.