Zero Touch Reference Data - The Address Verification Cloud
Leveraging the Cloud to verify addresses is easy to do and can pay significant dividends. Incorrect shipping addresses, address typos in Web forms, "return to sender" stamps, prospects who never receive marketing materials, and customers who don't get communicated to can all be a thing of the past simply by integrating a single line of validation code wherever address data is collected, either electronically or by humans. Address verification represents one of the best examples of how to leverage a cloud service to provide value internally to an organization with very little effort.
The United States Post Office (as do other postal entities around the world) publishes updates to their master physical address databases monthly. These updates capture all of the new houses that are being built, new businesses that emerge, the launching of new zip codes, and all of the other address additions, updates, and deletions that occur throughout the U.S. on an ongoing basis. Utilizing this master reference data as a validation source can ensure the accuracy of all collected addresses, comparing those collected to a master list in real-time (a millisecond across-the-Web check). This is something you definitely want to do as the address is collected, as waiting to fix bad addresses downstream can far more costly.
Obtaining, managing, and updating this verification reference data in the raw for an organization that wants to put it to use for maximum address accuracy can be a quite difficult exercise to undertake on their own however, and most often can only be done at considerable cost, requiring hardware, software, personnel, and time. And shortcut approaches that try to leverage this data without the frequent updates can be an absolute disaster.
This is where StrikeIron and the Cloud come in. We acquire and update the reference data from various third parties as frequently as they allow, maintain the data in our data centers within our multi-tenant, high performance delivery platform, have built and perfected intelligent algorithms to handle address matching ambiguity (a straight, raw lookup won't work), and provide interfaces to these verification algorithms available in multiple protocols (SOAP, REST, HTTP Secure) so they can easily be integrated into any business process, application, Web site, or even mobile device. We pull all of this together, productize it, and deliver it as simple, easy-to-use plug-and-play Web services API. A single line of code from any platform is all it takes to tap into these algorithms that are living out on the Web. And like all good Cloud services, all of the details are abstracted away.
Best of all, our solutions are usage-based in cost, so you don't have to bet the farm just to get started, and you can always start small. And, free trials are available, so we can gain your trust before you subscribe. Give it a try today!
