Spectrum Technology Platform

By Gaston Hummel and Tom Thomas, March 11, 2019

What are Incorrect Customer Addresses Costing your Business?

Poor quality customer data imposes costs and risks on businesses.  Gartner research, Harvard Business Review and Forbes Magazine agree that organizations estimate poor data quality to be responsible for an average of $15 million per year in losses.  These costs are not solely financial.  Businesses experience loss of reputation, missed opportunities and higher-risk decision making as the result of low confidence in data.

Delivery of one in twenty online orders fails on the first attempt, costing organizations an average of $15 per failed delivery.

18% of customer records in people databases such as CRM systems is duplicate.  Corporate data is growing at around 40% annually and each duplicate record costs organizations $20 to $100 per year in terms of time spent on upkeep and storage, not to mention the impact this has on customer experience. Do you have a plan to combat these issues for your organization?

The Root Causes of Poor Addresses

The first root cause is not validating addresses (and other contact information) at the point of capture. The second is not normalizing the formats of captured names and addresses.  Solutions exist to both problems - but effective solutions are not as simple as they might first appear.

A prime opportunity for you to capture and validate accurate address details is during the checkout process of an online order or the online signup process for a new service.  Many organizations have taken a first step towards improving address capture at these customer touchpoints by implementing AutoComplete/Type-Ahead solutions where the customer can just start typing their first address and a list of address matches pops up for the customer to select.  While such an AutoComplete/Type-Ahead solution is convenient for the customer, it by no means solves all your addressing problems.  Often the addresses presented by the AutoComplete/Type-Ahead datasets include building addresses both with and without suite or apartment numbers, meaning a customer selects their correct building address and overlooks that they selected a non-deliverable address by not including their apartment number.

How we do it: Accurate Addressing with Spectrum - A Proven Solution for Clean Customer Data

The largest global brands in finance, retail, insurance and telecom rely on our Spectrum solution for capturing and maintaining clean customer data.

Our expertise has lead us to an Accurate Addressing solution with Spectrum which relies on two web services. When used together, they accomplish the desired result of “getting the right address at the right time.” The web services will integrate easily into your web interface, and sample implementations are available if you are skeptical.

The web services are: Interactive AutoComplete/Type-Ahead, and Real-Time Address Resolution.

AutoComplete/Type-Ahead service – processes characters as they are typed into the address field of an online form. The engine searches its source data to dynamically predict and compile a list of address candidates. As the customer types their address, an address candidate list pops up for the user to select the correct address and minimize typing.

• AutoComplete/Type-Ahead expedites an address entry processes by reducing keystrokes. It resolves most common address entry problems by correcting mistypes and misspells. It eliminates parsing and misfielding of data by auto-populating fields on selection. It includes secondary addresses like apartment numbers when available to ensure selection accuracy. It is possible to filter the returned address candidates by postal code or geolocation for a faster, more intuitive experience and the maximum returned results is configurable.
• AutoComplete/Type-Ahead source data is optimized for returning fast results. Commonly, this data does not contain information about location accuracy or postal deliverability, making it critically important to complement the AutoComplete/Type-Ahead step with an Address Resolution

Address Resolution service - captures a selected address from an AutoComplete/Type-Ahead candidate list. It then standardizes and verifies the address against trusted third party source data (such as postal or geolocation data if desired) and returns a validated, postal deliverable or highly accurate geo-locatable address. If the candidate address does not validate postal delivery or meet geolocation accuracy thresholds, a list of verified address suggestions is output and displayed for the user to select. Additionally, algorithms including both phonetic and non-phonetic heuristics determine the accuracy and relevance of address suggestions.

• Address Resolution deliver additional benefits by standardizing and validating military, highway contract, rural route and PO Box addresses. It permits additional data quality processing should an address by selected by override. It resolves multi-match addresses where a pre- or post-directional is missing or incorrectly entered, appends accurate secondary addresses based on business name, applies postal conversation changes when available to keep addresses current and it returns an abundance of additional information about how the address matched and about its accuracy.
• The Address Resolution service returns all the information necessary to make confident business decisions based on address accuracy.

Next Steps

Click here to download an “Accurate Addressing – How To” whitepaper that includes code samples, explanations and sample applications to deploy in Spectrum for Accurate Addressing. 

There are two parts to this paper. The first looks at how the optimal Spectrum flows work to provide AutoComplete/Type-Ahead functionality and then Address Resolution to validate selected addresses as well as seamlessly (auto) correct non-deliverable addresses.  The second section looks at best practices for integrating the Accurate Addressing solution with your customer portal.