5 key tips for effectively verifying postal addresses
In many customer relations scenarios, the postal service is still the channel of choice. However, delivery failures are costly and degrade customer experience and confidence. Ensuring the reliability of customer addresses requires mastery of several criteria in postal data quality. Here are 5 tips to help.
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Undelivered mail is obviously the main consequence of invalid postal addresses. A failed shipment generates significant costs for the company, as it requires to recontact the customer, verify the address, and reship.
Verifying postal addresses is a prerequisite for sending parcels and mail to the right address. This starts with the addresses stored in the database, but doesn’t end there. The quality of address data plays a role on several levels.
Here are 5 recommendations to help you ensure the quality of your data.
1. Check postal addresses as soon as you enter them
Postal addresses are prone to entry errors!
The main causes of these errors are typographical and syntax mistakes. On the web, collecting address information from customers and prospects tends to result in numerous entry errors. In customer service, when operators enter an address given over the telephone, their misunderstanding of what is said is a classic example.
It’s important to check the validity of postal addresses as soon as they are entered. The solution is to use autocompletion of postal address entries, with a check upon completion of entry to suggest an address correction in the event of erroneous entry. The existence of postal addresses is thus validated and brought up to standard (address cleansing) by checking that they correspond to data from postal repositories.
2. Check, as well as standardise postal addresses
Checking the accuracy of postal addresses is not enough. You also need to standardise their format to avoid mistakes. In particular, when address formats are not standardised, exchanges with third-party systems – business partners, and transport and logistics providers, among others – face a lack of conformity that can quickly lead to blocking a process.
In such cases, you need to be able to refer to data structured according to the same standards to avoid intractable situations. This is why an accurate, up-to-date address is not enough: its format must also meet current postal standards.
3. Check addresses in reference to an official postal repository
The only repositories that can be used to check the accuracy and standardisation of addresses are those approved by the postal services, and not cartographic ones such as the solution offered by Google. Indeed, a cartographic repository cannot meet all address quality criteria, as it has several limitations: it is not frequently updated, which can result in obsolete information, and it lacks management of the finer granularity of address information – apartments, floors, differentiation of delivery points -, as well as not having verification of the existence of the address on the street, or providing for merging of municipal areas, etc.
A reliable data quality solution is based on official postal repositories. It thus guarantees management of all the criteria concerning the quality of the data, how recent it is, its standardization, and its accuracy. All of these elements are required for a reliable, usable postal address.
4. Master the quality of international postal addresses
With an international clientele, avoiding data entry errors and ensuring flawless deliveries requires mastery of the standards of different countries. Multiple criteria come into play, and the data quality of international postal addresses requires genuine expertise in postal standards, on a worldwide basis.
Being able to source the best postal repositories is essential, to ensure the reliability of addresses according to the databases that are certified in their respective countries. Data entry assistance solutions must comply with alphabets, local standards, and postal specifications in countries that require them. They must also adapt to the specific input requirements of each country and to international phonetic rules. As an added bonus, a transliteration capability ensures the literal phonetic transcription of street or city names in a different alphabet.
5. Activate the marketing bonus of valid postal addresses with geocoding
Data quality for postal addresses has another trick up its sleeve: enriching postal addresses with geographical longitude and latitude coordinates. Thanks to this constant geolocation data, a cutting-edge data quality solution can establish a precise map of the customer base in any given country.
This geolocation refines customer knowledge, making it possible to understand the profile, context (for example, proximity to a city center, busy neighborhood or street) and catchment area of different customers. This benefits campaign segmentation, with more personalized communications. For example, by identifying people who live within walking distance of a city center, marketing campaigns aimed at this segment of contacts can associate the brand’s points of sale nearby. In other words, postal address data quality also helps to improve targeting for better sales.
About DQE
Because data quality is essential to customer knowledge and the construction of a lasting relationship, since 2008, DQE has provided its clients with innovative and comprehensive solutions that facilitate the collection of reliable data.
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