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Data Cleansing

Why Address Verification in Your Salesforce Data is Important to Your Business

By November 11, 2021No Comments

Addresses are vital to the success of many businesses, serving as a direct link to customers and sales leads. Organizations are able to invoices customers, deliver product, and send marketing materials via an address list.  Location intelligence empowers companies to turn data such as addresses or latitude/longitude coordinates into customer insights and business value.

What is Address Verification? 

Before a business can communicate with customers and stakeholders, it needs to accurately verify the address data it has. Correct addresses increase a company’s efficiency as well as fortifying trust between company and customer. Ensuring that address data is accessible and correct is, therefore, of the utmost importance for all businesses.  

Address data is unfortunately easily corruptible, and mistakes as simple as typing “j” instead of “i” make a big difference. Incorrect address data can lead to increased costs for businesses. Sending deliveries to the wrong address can cause excessive lost item costs, in addition to degrading the confidence of the sales team in the data they rely on. Yet standard data maintenance doesn’t always include a reliable approach to address verification. 

Addresses are just complicated data types. In fact, there are over 130 various address formats worldwide, leading to many ways to incorrectly document an address. Verification of the addresses in your database requires vigilance.  

Common Errors with Address Data  

Errors in address data are inevitable. One common error is delayed address updating. People are constantly moving, making it important that your company’s database moves too and keeps up to date with such changes. Address verification tools can update addresses on a daily basis, preventing the use of outdated addresses.  

Another issue associated with address verification is how protected address data is. Customers are often wary to share private data. Addresses need to be protected under strict privacy walls and backed up in a secure location. Technology is not foolproof, and the onus is on businesses to take steps to keep the address data safe.  

Part of implementing and securing address data is understanding where the data originates. Any tool your company chooses to use should be able to verify that address data is being retrieved from reliable, certified sources.  

A must-have in address verification tools is the ability to overcome spelling mistakes. There is no way to prevent spelling mistakes introduced during address input due to human error. Successful address verification tools will be able to identify and overcome spelling errors. For instance, if someone inputs the city Philadelphia as Filadelfia, the program should be able to overcome and fix this error. This is also referred to as “Fuzzy Matching.” 

Your address verification tool needs to function with all previously mentioned 130 address variations. International capacity is vital to accommodating a wide variety of customer bases for business. Address verification tools utilize “Postal Authority” to ensure that all addresses are compliant with international standards. Back-end address verification is key to fixing any impurities in address data. A good back-end address cleanse will standardize, cleanse, and enhance data to provide you with the most accurate and complete address data. 

Address Data Verification Tools Support Good Address Data 

When looking for address verification tools, ensure that they address all possible errors in address data.  Manually combing through hundreds of thousands of address records is not a feasible solution to address verification for any business. Some of the best address verification tools on the market are able to not only protect your data but are also able to identify and correct erroneous records.  

Many tools also support features that make it easier for companies to collect address records such as one-tap geolocation. This allows a customer to input their address with a quick tap on a mobile device. For instance, address capture “allows your customers to find and validate the correct address in real time.” 

Ultimately, using address verification tools is a win-win for business. At their core, the tools will cleanse and correct all erroneous address records. Besides streamlining address collection processes and adding increased security, address verification tools make address input more user-friendly for customers. By utilizing a quality Address Verification tool, businesses can trust the addresses they have on record, thereby ensuring that deliveries will go out to the correct location, invoices will be directed to the right address, and marketing outreach will be much more successful with reliable, location information.  

To learn more about how best to both deduplicate and verify the addresses in your database, schedule a demo with DataGroomr today. 

Steven Pogrebivsky

Steve Pogrebivsky has founded multiple successful startups and is an expert in data and content management systems with over 25 years of experience. Previously, he co-founded and was the CEO of MetaVis Technologies, which built tools for Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and other cloud-based information systems. MetaVis was acquired by Metalogix in 2015. Before MetaVis, Steve founded several other technology companies, including Stelex Corporation, which provided compliance and technical solutions to FDA-regulated organizations. Steve holds a BS in Computer/Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Information Systems from Drexel University.