Customer Insight Starts with Address Accuracy
In today’s digital commerce ecosystem, the postal mail address is often overlooked as the fundamental underpinning that supports customer insight and intelligence, and a required component necessary to compete in a disruptive, increasingly digital, and ever more mobile marketplace. Physical addresses are now a vital factor of the changing landscape of retail, insurance and telecommunications, as well as other industries that they have become the focal point for location intelligence. However, errors in address quality can bring these keystones crashing down.
Whether taking an order from an eCommerce platform or pricing an insurance policy, the customer’s address is a primary input. Here, accuracy is critical in numerous ways. First, businesses need to make certain that their customer relationship management (CRM) system maintains the golden record of their clients starting with correct address data.
Second, addresses are the pivot point in providing a 360-degree view of the customer, starting with an accurate location but accommodating the ability to append information related to other purchases made by the customer or other insurance policies held by that individual, as examples. Lastly, a correctly formatted address will lead to delivering an accurate geocode, the latitude and longitude used for efficient mail delivery or route planning.
Getting the address correct the first time mitigates potential discrepancies associated with lost or late deliveries, or underpricing a policy for a high-risk property. The Loqate Global Address Capture and Verification solutions allow for front-end, real-time address capture and back-end batch address verification for ALL countries and territories. In addition, type-ahead predictive technology allows for real-time address search and capture as data is being entered. Erroneous address data is corrected and standardized before it enters an organization’s data centers. Therefore, resulting in a faster, more accurate completion of any digital journey.
Let’s look at the solutions in detail. Loqate’s Global Parsing Engine consists of proprietary lexicon and context parsing rules created specifically for each country and territory around the world. The parsing engine standardizes and corrects addresses from unstructured and semi-structured data, automatically placing elements into the correct fields and eliminating erroneous non-address data. How often have you seen “Main Street” misspelled as “Mane or Maine Street”?
Verify is Loqate’s component level solution for real-time or batch verification needs, capable of processing more than three million records per hour. Verify will indicate the validity of each address value included in the input address. Address Capture, comprised of Loqate's type-ahead predictive technology, location biasing and fuzzy matching features, makes it easy to capture accurate addresses as new data is being entered into online web or mobile forms, such as a CRM.
If the goal is to increase revenue, then the objective is winning customers at the point of need and retaining that loyalty for future purchases. Note too that sometimes the customer is an internal member of your team. They are as important as the retail consumer. Therefore, any journey, whether that’s the insurance agent capturing the client’s home address from a phone interview, or the retail consumer entering their billing address during an online checkout, you will want to leave that individual with a high degree of confidence that their data is accurate. This is especially important for retailers as they accelerate their move to digital commerce, where communication must be precise, personal and contextual.
Let’s also look at another use case where digital disruption is particularly acute: company mergers. Companies merge to reduce expenses, gain new customers or to upsell new products to existing clients. Merging CRM and billing databases are not simple exercises. How do you know which are joint customers that may contain overlapping, perhaps incorrect address information?
Addresses are usually invariant, but not standardized across CRM systems. Matching customer databases becomes difficult and presents risk of duplication, miss-fielded data and simple misspellings. Small companies may merge into a larger company, and adjusting to a new scale of business is a challenge well-suited for Loqate’s Address Verification solutions.
From companies such as Stibo Systems, a customer master data management software company, to multi-national tech giants such as Oracle and IBM that are embedding the Loqate solution, each is looking for the best of breed technology to support address verification, improve data quality and obtain the best geocoding match rates. How you and your company embed Loqate’s solutions is up to you. We provide our solutions to run on-premise, in the cloud as a private or hosted solution, or as an API for more customized applications.
For any size enterprise and for any IT infrastructure, Loqate can support your data quality needs to improve customer insights and address accuracy. Loqate’s Global Partner Program connects businesses with address verification software powered by the most accurate global location data available in the market, enabling you to deliver exceptional experiences to customers wherever they are located.
To learn more about our solutions and the benefits of joining our Global Partner Program, click here.