Beyond Address Verification: Enriching Address Data

Address verification, the concept of using a Web service API to ensure that an address exists according to United States (or Canada) post office reference data, is easy, straight-forward, and valuable. With a single line of code, the capability can be built into Web forms, applications, business processes, and more to ensure that customer and prospect addresses that have been collected are accurate and complete.

From a business perspective, the United States Post Office estimates about $2 billion annually is spent on postage each year to undeliverable addresses. And this number doesn't include the cost of wasted print and marketing materials, missed opportunities, and poor customer service as a result of bad address data, the costs of which can very well be several times higher.

But solving this problem with address verification and correction is only part of the story. If you are already verifying the existence of an address, you can also enrich the data around the same address with many additional data points determined from that address. This can add some significant business value ROI, especially considering the ease at which it can be done.

For example, you can programmatically look up the current phone number that is associated with a specific address in a national phone book database that is updated every 24 hours. You can add latitude and longitude coordinates to an address to allow them to be plotted on a map to gain visual information about sets of addresses. You can also add other geographical information such as county, congressional district, and other post office specific data such as carrier route.

You can also determine if the address is that of a business or an individual, and then append the appropriate demographic data, such as revenue and SIC code for businesses, or estimated income, length of residency, and other census data for individuals.

In addition, you can also perform distance calculations on that address to other addresses (such as your closest retail outlet, or distance from your headquarters.)

For example, if all you have is this kind of simple, incomplete information about an address:

With a few Web services SOAP or REST calls you can automated the process of it becoming this:

As one example, we have integrated a lot of these capabilities into Salesforce.com using these same APIs, and that eliminates even the simple integration step: http://crm.strikeiron.com/

In other words, a simple address can be an effective gateway to a wealth of information that can aid marketing, customer service, sales, and provide better business intelligence about your customers, members, prospects, and other addresses you consider to be an information asset.

Comments

[Scott]

Did Strikeiron build a native engine or just add a nice web services layer on top of existing Address Cleaning Products (e.g. Pitney Bowes/Group1)?

[Bob Brauer]

Scott,

We have our own engine we use, and we also use address verification engines from DataFlux (part of SAS Institute), and Address Doctor (part of Informatica). In each case, we have a normalized API available for consistency of usage across all of these, and then our platform provides for all of the user management, metering, and pay-as-you-go capabilities.