As digital channels grow in popularity, companies and business leaders are becoming aware of the importance of various data quality solutions. Among these solutions, address validation is particularly valuable, as supply chains have been disrupted globally and online shopping and delivery volume are at all-time highs.
That said, my role at Experian is Global Product Lead for Validation Solutions with the primary focus being hosted address validation services.
What is Experian Address Validation?
Our flagship product, Experian Address Validation (EAV for short), is a powerful and fast-growing REST API. Along with our Email and Phone product lines, it is at the very core of what we do with our international SaaS solutions. Its flexibility, feature richness, and sheer breadth of global data coverage allow integrators to create amazing interfaces for real-time data capture, bringing so much value to their organizations and millions of end-users.
Also worth noting is that EAV links directly with our extensive enrichment data catalogue which allows users to append non-postal address attributes, such as demographic data or business records. Many of these are proprietary to Experian, setting our product apart from competition and into a class of its own.
The need for such a solution across industries was further emphasized this year when we surveyed 500 businesses, and 42% reported that poor address data quality wastes resources and adds additional costs, while 40% reported that it inhibits their ability to understand customers and deliver a personalized experience.
How Experian Address Validation works
EAV is a market-leading, “one-stop shop” API toolkit that combines data from global postal authorities, highest accuracy third-party providers, and of course, Experian’s own proprietary sources. It provides integrators with an effortless way to create enormously powerful solutions for their end users. This includes a comprehensive address and enrichment element collection, global transliteration capabilities, unlimited scaling for both real-time and batch processing, and high-accuracy matching engines.
What does that mean?
- The solution quickly captures addresses as they’re input, correcting typos and mistakes in real-time to reduce time and effort required for a customer to fill in their address.
- The solution will format the address as needed — either to local postal authority standards, or to the format preferred by your business.
- It will then validate the address against postal sources, high precision third party providers and Experian’s proprietary data sources to confirm the address exists and is deliverable.
- Lastly, it enriches the address with valuable intelligence determined by your business needs.
Want precision location intelligence to optimize logistics? It can do that. Want powerful demographic insights to power up your marketing and business strategy? It can do that. Want to add business view data to improve segmentation and targeting? It can do all that and more.
What makes Experian Address Validation great?
Based on our latest research report, 86% of respondents said that data quality is fundamental to the core of their business operation moving forward. Customers are looking for solutions that will guarantee that the data entering their systems is as accurate and actionable as possible. What’s more, they need these solutions to be feature-rich and non-intrusive (that is, super-fast and seamless to integrate).
Customers also have a strong preference for APIs that can be plugged into their existing applications with minimal development effort. Since all commercial address validation solutions require some form of reference data (e.g., USPS® or Royal Mail postal information), providing instant response over the web and a clean, “plug-and-play" type API that can be integrated within hours and offers the necessary security, scalability, and international data coverage, is extremely hard to achieve.
Experian Address Validation is important because it meets these needs. It’s a global service that can standardize, format, validate and enrich address data through a single API that offers 200ms or faster response for any of its 245 countries and territories supported, secure global infrastructure, cloud scalability, and close to 100% uptime. I should also mention our strong relationships with all major global postal authorities and regional data providers, our numerous address accuracy certifications, our comprehensive technical documentation and sample code, and our 24/7 global customer support team.
In summary, EAV helps customers capture the right addresses in the correct format for the relevant postal authority. With precise location intelligence, it ensures more deliveries get to the right front door, day in and day out. More specifically, we help marketing teams understand their customers better and increase marketing conversion with our broad enrichment capabilities. Customer-facing teams can capture the right data quickly and accurately; businesses are enabled to spot potential fraud better and the need for manual data correction is reduced. For all those reasons and more, contact data validation is vital to optimizing and supporting business operations right around the globe.
An expert's favorite parts of Experian Address Validation
One of the joys of working for Experian is our commitment to our customers and our focus on building the perfect solution for each business. In many ways, Experian Address Validation is the culmination of a 30-year-long development effort to create the perfect address quality service. As a result, EAV is a rich, broad product with so much to offer customers that it’s a perfect fit for our strong customer focus. It’s also difficult to list the top benefits because it offers so much!
- One thing I love about the solution is that it all works from a single API—businesses of all shapes and sizes, from start-ups to multinationals with branches around the world, can use that single API throughout their entire enterprise to provide an identically fast, accurate, and secure solution anywhere it is deployed.
- Many customers love that the product is so mature and is supported by a team of global experts, many of whom have been in the data quality industry for decades.
- Our clients appreciate that we know the domain so well, and truly care about every one of their use cases. Many competitors cater to just one or two typical address capture use cases (such as type-ahead address capture), but our underlying engines are diverse and optimized for the many ways people search for addresses globally.
It isn’t just about a particular country preferring “postal code-first" or “street number-first" approach, it is about advanced algorithms that have been crafted over decades of engineering effort and contain deep knowledge of how humans think about addresses and vast quantities of data that are used within milliseconds to return the most appropriate response.
Sometimes it feels that our products read peoples’ minds: I promise AI isn’t that good yet, though this may be coming in our lifetimes, so stay tuned for our future product releases.
