How Does Address Data Quality Impact Your Business Reputation?
It is appalling how poor address data quality costs companies a whopping $12.9 million yearly! Working on your data management methods is the need of the hour to function effectively and avoid losing revenue.
But how can you achieve this goal?
Luckily, address quality management is not rocket science and address verification tools like PostGrid can help you! Hence, you can save weeks and months of your time and increase productivity significantly.
This blog reveals how outdated data can hurt your business and the different methods to solve them. It also emphasizes the importance of effective data management in all industries, like healthcare, retail, financial services, etc.
Let us dive right into it!
What is Poor Postal Address Quality?
Poor address data quality refers to incorrect, invalid, incomplete, and misleading delivery addresses. It also means having outdated information that can lead to misdeliveries and delays.
The meaning can differ from industry to industry, but it all boils down to “incorrect customer information!” Thus, companies take several steps to update their data frequently to make it accessible whenever needed.
Sadly, organizations find it hard to implement these steps because of a lack of resources. Identifying poor address quality and determining how to fix it takes expertise, effort, and several other factors.
Here are the primary reasons your database may contain poor-quality data:
- Incorrect postal codes: Often, customers might forget to provide you with their postal codes, rendering the address incomplete. Or they might enter the wrong codes, negatively affecting the quality of your address data. PostGrid’s address verification API can help you add the correct postal codes within seconds without manual intervention.
- Missing street names: Your staff might run a search to find the postal codes by using the street names. But what happens when the customer forgets to write down their street address? It becomes impossible to track their location, making the record useless. Also, invalid street names and numbers can add to poor address quality because they don’t exist. They can cause mail carriers to deliver items to the wrong people, leading to data leakages, lost packages, etc.
- Switched characters and incorrect spellings: Bad address quality also comes from minor errors, like typos, misspellings, or switched characters. For example, if you write 12 – 123 Aberdeen Avenue, it means an entirely different address than 123 – 12 Aberdeen Avenue. Thus, you must be careful when switching characters to avoid major blunders.
- Incorrect abbreviations: Canada Post advises using the correct abbreviations for street directionals, states, and street types. For instance, RD stands for the road (AVE stands for the avenue, etc.). It helps you enhance the quality of your address data and mail more efficiently.
- Standardization issues: You must use the correct Canada Post address format to preserve your address quality and avoid problems later. All businesses should standardize their delivery addresses before mailing so the postal workers can process the envelopes and packages speedily.
Here’s an example of the Canada Post postal address format:
John Smith
15 – 24 Main ST NW
Montreal QC H1Y 1J8
PostGrid’s address verification services offer fuzzy matching and several other ways to improve your address data quality and save costs. You can integrate our API into your Hubspot, Salesforce, Quickbooks, etc., CRMs and verify addresses on-demand. Or you may incorporate it into your website and confirm the customer address quality at the point of entry.
Also Read: Address Lookup API
Examples of How Address Data Quality Affects a Business
Here are some real-life examples of how your address quality can transform your operations completely:
E-Commerce Businesses
E-commerce brands depend on the customer’s inputs to get a delivery address and manage deliveries. However, without an autocomplete API, customers are compelled to enter their complete addresses manually, making it time-consuming and tedious. Thus, these addresses might contain errors, like misspellings and missing details.
Also, many customers might drop the transaction because of the lengthy checkout process. Thus, you must employ an effective autocomplete and verification API like PostGrid to ensure address data quality at all times.
It makes data sharing easier, saves time, and helps you capture the most accurate customer data. Hence, you can manage your address quality better and satisfy your customers with on-time deliveries.
Financial Services
Financial institutions, like banks, credit card agencies, mortgage companies, etc., use address quality verification to confirm customer identities. It also helps them deliver crucial documents to the correct people and safeguard data privacy.
Until a few years back, banks and other organizations had the resources to collect customer information, but not enough to update their databases. Thus, they relied on outdated data to correspond with clients or operate smoothly. However, it led to the miss-delivering of documents with sensitive information and data breaches.
Such scenarios resulting from poor address data quality can tarnish your brand reputation and make your company lose customers. Hence, you should cross-check customer details frequently to filter outdated entries and deliver financial mail safely.
Why Is It Crucial to Employ a Regular Address Quality Verification Mechanism?
Below are more reasons your company must invest in the address data quality urgently:
Boost Productivity and Employee Morale
We are sure your staff has better work than calling every client to verify their address details. Furthermore, your customers might get annoyed and not provide you with adequate information. Chances are they start treating your calls as spam and avoiding you, making it hard to check the address data quality for your business.
Thus, your address quality checker must use an automated tactic wherein you don’t need to contact customers to verify their information. For example, PostGrid uses Canada Post’s authoritative database having millions of addresses to confirm your customers’ delivery data.
Thus, your staff gets a break from manual and daunting tasks and can focus on other activities.
Improve Data Security and Brand Reputation
Poor address data quality can result in hundreds of mail returns and lost items. And you cannot afford to make customers wait for their packages beyond the estimated arrival times. It demonstrates your brand as unreliable, damaging your company-customer relationships significantly.
Also, remember the average cost of data leakage per incident was $6.75 million in 2021. Not investing in address quality makes it easy for frauds to steal your customers’ identities and misuse their sensitive data.
In such cases, you may face legal trouble and backlash, making it essential to prioritize address quality and data security.
Make Quick Decisions and Expand Your Business
Companies can make fast decisions only when their address quality is up-to-date and helps form a reliable foundation. For instance, imagine you must decide whether to launch your new store in Montreal or Toronto. However, you need to learn about the customer base in those locations before deciding anything.
If most of your customers live in Toronto, it makes sense to open a store in this city, and good address quality can help you during the process.
Thus, using address data quality checkers like PostGrid’s address validation API helps you be more informed and expand your business. Also, we offer international address verification, making it possible for companies to connect with customers beyond borders.
You can parse and standardize addresses from 245+ countries and mail confidently. Also, our rates are highly competitive, allowing you to ship items affordably and speedily.
How Does PostGrid Help Clients Improve Their Address Data Quality in No Time?
PostGrid’s address verification solutions are apt for all businesses that want to work on their address quality and improve their revenue.
Here are the primary benefits PostGrid offers to its clients:
- SERP-verified addresses: PostGrid is SERP-certified, which means it uses the Canada Post sources to verify your address data quality. Also, it guarantees that you get a 99.99% deliverability rate.
- NCOA processing: PostGrid cross-checks every address against the NCOA data file to determine whether any of your customers have moved to a different place. Thus, you can re-engage your old clients effortlessly and filter outdated delivery addresses.
- DPV: Delivery Point Validation helps you check your address quality up to the accurate delivery location. Hence, you can rest assured that your packages reach the correct addresses without delays or misinterpretation.
- Enhance your data: PostGrid helps enrich your address data quality by adding missing information and fixing minor mistakes. It also enables you to compile new, targeted mailing lists to improve your outreach and drive more conversions.
- Bulk address verification: You can verify millions of addresses in one go with PostGrid. Our automated solutions help you manage your address data quality in the least time possible, speeding up delivery processes.
Also Read: E-commerce Address Validation
Conclusion
Identifying the issues in your address data quality and fixing them is beneficial to every business. It allows them to operate more effectively, increase brand reputation, and improve customer satisfaction.
Moreover, PostGrid’s address validation services make it a breeze to update your databases and ship items to the correct destinations. You can also use this data for accurate mapping, marketing, retargeting customers, financial budgeting, etc.
Request a demo now to see how we help you improve your address data quality at affordable rates!
