Database : The Address Quality Gatekeeper

Keep human error out of your data

Collecting and maintaining accurate address information is an issue for companies of all sizes. The ramifications of poor address quality can be far-reaching and expensive. What you need is a gatekeeper.

In the past, organizations often didn't take steps to tackle issues with inaccurate customer information because it resided in multiple, unconnected databases. Individual business units kept their own records, so departments like sales, service, marketing and billing may have had data on the same customer in different formats on different servers with no standardization. Even with integrated CRM systems, this issue is pervasive. Though the technology has improved, the challenge of normalizing data across disparate sources still exists.

Address Quality Myths
Many companies prefer to cling to beliefs about address data quality instead of pursuing a solution. Some of the more prevalent assumptions include:

• Customer DIY: The fact is, your customers will not police their own data quality. They won't even notice they made the mistakes. If they don't receive their orders, guess who looks bad. Unless you have processes in place to validate address information and check for duplicates, your master file is likely to become a tangled mess of partial, duplicate and erroneous data.

• Call center limitations: No matter how well they are trained, a customer service representative or telemarketer isn't going to know if the customer neglected to supply street directionals or that house number digits have been transposed. Garbage in, garbage out.

• Returned mail: Some documents are quite expensive to correct and remail. The cost to manually recreate applications such as brokerage statements can be three to five times the amount spent to produce the original. Undelivered marketing materials can result in missed sales opportunities. This gets especially critical on multichannel campaigns where related content is communicated based on an anticipated in-home date.

By the way, undeliverable mail sent at Standard Mail rates is not returned unless the mailer uses a proper ancillary endorsement and then pays the single-piece rate for each one returned. Undelivered marketing pieces hurt the ROI of the campaign.

• Paper or paperless? It's true companies continue to push customers toward electronic statements. But the majority of consumers still want bills and statements to arrive by mail. As for marketing messages, there is a lot less competition for attention in the postal mailbox than the email inbox—and no spam filters! Postal mail remains a vital communication channel, especially when used in conjunction with electronic delivery.

Unfortunately, these assumptions are all false.

What Is a Gatekeeper?
One way to build a database of high-quality addresses is with a point-of-entry solution. This software acts as a gatekeeper to ensure no address enters your database unless it has been validated. There is no sense in adding records to your system that are going to cost money to fix later on. A gatekeeper will prevent most errors from getting into your system in the first place.

Address quality gatekeepers typically include three major processes:

1. Standardized address formatting to USPS specifications: This enables other valuable functions to work, including duplicate recognition, presort discounts, postal barcoding, move update processing, deliverability validation, geocoding, demographic matching and list segmentation.

2. Address correction/verification: Any misspelled streets and cities should get automatically corrected upon entry. More importantly, you need to be able to identify missing and incorrect elements such as street directionals, house numbers, suites and apartment numbers. At the point of entry, a gatekeeper system can prompt the customer or the operator to supply missing data. This is the very best time to capture elements that are essential to effective communication.

3. Delivery point validation: Delivery point validation goes one step further than address verification by validating that there is a mail receptacle at the given address, rather than just confirming the house number is within a defined range. This prevents mail from being addressed to parking lots or undeveloped property.

Keeping Up With the Joneses
Gatekeeping at the point of entry is just one part of a data quality strategy. Customer address data gets stale in a hurry, so existing contact data files need to be processed through data quality software on a regular basis. Every month, some customers leave and others are won back. There are ZIP code changes the USPS makes to adjust to population shifts. And about 40 million individuals, families and businesses move each year.

Keeping up with movers isn't just good business, it's required to qualify for USPS discounts. There are multiple approved methods for updating the addresses of customers who have filed change-of-address notices with the Postal Service. Many companies use USPS-aproved software to check addresses against the National Change of Address (NCOA) data set and receive updated address records before mailing.

Address quality is not a one-shot deal. But using a gatekeeper process, along with other available data quality tools, will help keep your customer communications efficient and effective, and will reduce costs and minimize waste.

Jessica Formosa is director of marketing at Seattle-based contact data quality and mailing preparation solutions provider Satori Software. Reach her at jformosa@satorisoftware.com.

• MORE ON
• DATABASE & CRM