Address Capture

Address capture is the process of obtaining and documenting a physical address. Mostly, you'll see address capture in action when people input their address details into forms, websites, applications, or other systems.

Here's a breakdown of the key aspects of address capture:

What's involved in address capture?

• Grabbing address components: Address capture collects the usual parts of an address, like street address, apartment number, city, state/province, postal code, and country.
• Revamped user interface: Capture plugs in wherever users enter address info and other data, which may be text fields, dropdown menus, or auto-complete suggestions.
• Validation and standardization: This means checking the address format, correcting potential errors, and standardizing it according to official guidelines. Learn more: What is address standardisation?
• ...and then into storage: Finally, once the grunt work is done, you'll save the captured address in a database or system for future use.
  
  

Why is address capture important?

Address capture is key for a variety of reasons:

• Delivery delight: Capturing accurate addresses ensures your packages and mail are successfully delivered.
• Perfect data quality: Maintaining clean and standardized address data is key to ensuring effective customer communications and accurate analytics. This should form part of a plan for optimal data quality. 
• Peerless customer experience: Noone loves filling in forms, so ensuring a smooth and user-friendly address capture process improves customer satisfaction, both at checkout and then in the delivery experience afterwards.
• Makes compliance a cinch: Many industries have complex regulations requiring proper address capture for tax purposes or fraud prevention, for example GDPR or KYC for gaming companies. Validated addresses are compliant addresses. 
  
  

What are the main methods of address capture?

Capture can be done in a number of different ways, with some decidedly easier and more accurate than others. Here are the main ones we know of: 

• Manual entry: As it sounds, this is where users will type in their address details individually. The problem with this is that there's a risk of typos or incorrect data entering your CRM - but it's still a legit form of address capture.
• Auto-complete suggestions: The next step in capture might be to offer auto-completed suggestions based on partial entries or known locations. This options comes as standard with address capture solutions like Loqate. Learn more: Address Autocomplete
• Mobile device capture: Mobile devices allow for additional information to be employed in validating addresses, such as utilizing the inbuilt GPS or address book information. Nifty.
• Scanning pre-printed addresses: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can capture addresses from documents, adding another layer of accurate address gathering.
  
  

How to do address capture right

Address capture sounds great, right? Well, it is - when it's done right. But there are some key considerations to take into account before you leap into reviewing your own capture process.

• Clarity and simplicity: As we said before, no-one loves filling in forms! So, your user interface needs to be clear and easy to understand, minimizing confusion and errors and keeping the process as pain-free as possible.
• Validation and error correction: As much as possible, you want to ensure that your validation solution is comprehensive as it gets. Making addresses correct is complex, and should include identifying and correcting typos, replacing missing information, and identifying and rectifying invalid formats.
• Going global: Support different address formats and languages for global users, as well as incorporating transliteration where required. This is a key component of global address validation, and many address validators fall short on this aspect. 
• Keeping it secure: Finally, and perhaps most importantly - it's crucial to ensure proper data protection and privacy measures are in place, both for compliance and for your (and your customers') peace of mind.
  
  

By understanding the definition, importance, and various methods of address capture, you can develop efficient and secure solutions for collecting accurate and complete address information. Discover how Loqate can implement an effective address capture journey at the push of a button via our very own Address Capture product, or book a demo with our expert support staff to learn more.