Enterprise Address Management
Verify All Customer Addresses – Physical and Postal.
It has never cost so much to have a bad address. First, the hard costs: postage, printing, paper, processing. Then there is the "impact" cost: a statement that doesn't reach the account holder, a targeted offer that misses its mark, or a prospective customer lost because they could not be matched up to services and products located nearby them.
The reality is that a bad address costs your company relationships. It chips away at your brand equity, and creates opportunity for your competition.
Bad addresses cost your company more than postage, printing and processing. Bad addresses also cost your company relationships. Every customer has more than one address. The reality is that as multi-channel communications have become a priority for organisations that wish to nurture lifetime customer relationships and it is not good enough to not know the right address for your customer, or perform separate programs for postal address validation and geocoding. What is essential is for a unified approach to address validation – for all of your customers’ addresses.
What is the difference between a physical address and a postal address?
Historically address validation has been approached in a fragmented fashion. Postal address validation programs were established to secure the benefits of bulk mail discounting and improve the reliability of delivery for printed communications. However, almost all customer databases hold at least one other address for a customer – their physical address. A physical address is a representation of where the customer usually lives, and/or works. Physical address validation is often neglected unless there was a ‘geocoding’ program in place. Geocoding is essentially the process of translating a street address reference into a location on the map. Often this physical address was cleansed just enough to facilitate getting a geocode on the map – even if that meant only getting the location precise enough to say it is in the right suburb.
Pitney Bowes was the first organisation in the world to offer certified address validation services for both postal addresses and physical addresses in Australia. These certification programs are called AMAS, for postal address validation and NAMF and for physical address validation.