If you’re an educational institution that receives lists of prospective students on a weekly basis or a retail organization that is preparing for a direct mail marketing campaign, it is important to have the proper tools in-house to ensure that your addresses are being cleansed and standardized for your marketing initiatives.
Whether you’re looking for a standalone solution to simply upload flat files or a solution that will directly integrate into your application, Experian Data Quality has the right bulk cleansing solutions to fit your needs.
The following guide will walk you through how to choose the right solution based on your business requirements, from certifications to qualify your organization for postal discounts to the different deployments available to suit your technical requirements.
CASS and SERP Certification
To reduce mailing costs for bulk direct mailing initiatives, postal discounts are available through the United States Postal Service’s CASS Certification and Canada Post’s SERP Certification. Processing your lists through CASS and SERP certified tools qualify your organization for bulk mailing discounts through postal services. Not only does this qualify your organization for these discounts, but this ensures that your campaigns are reaching individuals with valid, deliverable addresses. To be eligible for these programs, your lists must be processed through CASS and SERP certified software solutions. The solutions can append additional information, such as DPV and Carrier Route codes to complete the reports for obtaining these discounts. Experian Data Quality’s bulk cleansing solutions will qualify your organization for postal discounts through CASS and SERP certification.
Deployment Methods
Experian Data Quality has different solutions available based on your team’s technical requirements, from on premise and hosted, to standalone applications and APIs.
Our hosted solutions provide users with an ease of maintenance in terms of how the data is accessed. Our data is hosted in our data centers, providing users with access to automatic updates of the datasets we have available as well as product improvements made to different releases.
Our standalone offerings, Batch Standalone and Clean Application, allow users to easily deploy the solution to simply upload flat files and download the cleansed and standardized results through a wizard-driven interface. No integration work is required to utilize either solution. In Batch Standalone, processes can be scheduled in advance to process your records on a nightly and weekly basis.
For organizations that are looking to directly integrate these solutions, APIs and SDKs are available. Web service calls can be made via SOAP API to process up to 1,000 records per API call in our hosted bulk cleansing solution, Clean Web Service. A SOAP request containing an array of records with information indicating the configuration of the process is made in this scenario. This process can be automated and the results can be committed directly back to your database. Our on-premise bulk cleansing solution, CorrectAddress, provides APIs and SDKs available for integration at both the database and application level. At the database level, external functions are called through extended stored procedures within PL/SQL for Oracle databases or within SQL server. Additionally, functions can be executed through CLR assemblies within SQL server. APIs are available to enable applications to call the solution from different programming environments. In addition to the APIs and SDKs available, a wizard is also available to process flat files.
Datasets available (USA, international, DataPlus, etc.)
Our solutions provide users with the flexibility to cleanse address records in different countries and return additional elements to provide insight into the record that was processed. Although CorrectAddress only provides support for processing Canadian and US addresses, our other bulk cleansing solutions allow users to process records from different countries.
Within each solution, users can easily configure layouts to return additional information (DPV, County Code, etc.).
How do they compare?
Let’s take a closer look at each solution:
CorrectAddress – enables users to validate and standardize addresses both in real-time and bulk
- APIs and SDKs available for integration
- Can be integrated at the database or application levels
- Bulk processes can be automated; wizard available to process flat files in bulk
- CASS and SERP-certified
- USA and CAN
- On-premise
Why choose this solution?
- On-premise
- Higher volumes
- Option to integrate and upload flat files
- Automate process
Batch Standalone – bulk validation solution with a wizard-driven interface
- No integration work required, standalone application
- Processes can be scheduled ahead of time to clean records at a future date and time; up to a week in advance – no automation out of the box
- CASS Certified
- International countries
- On-premise
Why choose this solution?
- No integration work
- Simply want to upload flat files
- On-premise
Clean Web Services – address validation solution that allows users to cleanse their addresses in bulk via web service
- Web service calls are made via SOAP API and responses are returned in an XML
- SaaS
- 1000 records can be submitted per API call
- Process can be automated and committed back to database
- CASS and SERP-certified
- International countries
- Hosted
Why choose this solution?
- Hosted
- International capabilities
- Automate process
Clean Application – address validation solution that allows customers to process their records in bulk via an online application
- No integration work required
- SaaS
- Records are uploaded to the application via flat file and processed results are returned with the appropriate match records, cleansed addresses, and additional elements based on layout
- Easily configure layout to return additional information (DPV, County Code, etc.)
- Several jobs can be run at a single time; notification is sent when records are complete
- International countries
- Hosted
Why choose this solution?
- Hosted
- International capabilities
