28 blog posts tagged "Address validation"

My name is Jeffrey Duncan, and at the pestering of Smarty’s editor, I’m writing a blog about the many adventures I’ve had in life and how address data has played a big part in them. I met my wife about eight years ago on a dating website. At the time, I lived in Provo, Utah, while she lived in Palmwoods, Australia, on the east coast of Queensland. On this dating app, I entered the area where I was interested in finding someone, about a 25-mile radius of Provo, Utah. I had no intention of leaving the valley, definitely not the state, and certainly not the country.

Address verification isn't just a nice-to-have feature—it's a critical business function that directly impacts your bottom line and customer satisfaction. The impact of reliable address verification extends throughout your entire operation. Every returned package or piece of mail represents wasted shipping costs, lost time, and potential damage to customer relationships. Most importantly, it's an entirely preventable problem. When addresses are verified before shipping, businesses see immediate improvements in delivery success rates and significant reductions in associated costs.

In 2024, it’s estimated that online purchases, or ecommerce, made up more than 20% of global retail, with 2. 77 billion people shopping online, and those numbers will only get bigger in the following years. With so much online shopping, more goods and services are being shipped than ever before—including during the height of the Sears catalog in 1970. Side note: If you’re reading this and you don’t know what the Sears catalog was or how much it impacted the average home, it’s worth taking a trip down memory lane and seeing how your elders used to shop.

In healthcare, the havoc an inaccurate address can wreak on your financial results is significant in more ways than one, and the boost in overall profitability from maintaining a clean address database is equally worth noting. Accurate healthcare address validation improves operational efficiency, patient engagement, and compliance and builds revenue to heights that couldn’t be met without it. Here’s what we’ll be covering:Healthcare address validation pros and consCon: Increased claim denials and organizational costsPro: Reduced claim denials and reprocessing costsCon: Increasing patient match error ratesPro: Improved patient matching and data qualityCon: Complicated billing and collections processesPro: Streamlined billing and collections capabilitiesCon: Exposure to legal liabilitiesPro: Enhanced regulatory compliance and risk aversionCon: Misplaced market strategyPro: Data-driven decision-making and market insightsEpilogue: Avoiding the pain (see our summarized financial savings)Healthcare address validation pros and consThere’s a pro and a con associated with having (or not having 🫣) accurate address data in your healthcare systems.

The customer experience (CX) landscape is changing faster than a squirrel on espresso 🐿️☕, driven by technological advancements, consumer expectation evolution, and the need for all things to become digital. Maybe you wanna keep up with the change. That’s great. Or even better, you want to get ahead of all the other guys. That’s where Smarty comes in. Looking at what the future of customer experience will be like in 2025 and beyond (supported by relevant statistics and insights from various studies we’ve collected), address autocomplete and verification play a bigger role than you might suspect.

Do you know what's more satisfying than watching address autocomplete perfectly fill out online forms? Absolutely nothing—except maybe biting into a warm cinnamon roll on National Cinnamon Day. Mmmmmmm. Speaking of warm and sweet experiences, today we're exploring how address autocomplete (when configured without best practices in mind) can turn from a delightful treat into a bitter disappointment and how address verification can save the day. Personalize the experienceYou know how cinnamon shows up uninvited in every fall-themed product from September through December? No one asked for that, and it's pretty presumptuous.

If you’re here, you appreciate a good horror movie, especially around Halloween time. There are many different subgenres of scary movies: slasher, found footage, psychological horror, supernatural horror, monster, folklore, zombie, gothic fiction, paranormal fiction, and the list goes on and on for a frighteningly long time. One thing all horror movies have in common is a scary setting. Maybe the trees are creepy and dead. Perhaps the house is rotting from the inside out. Sometimes, the location has historical significance with real and traumatic events.

Happy National Ask a Stupid Question Day! Today’s the day you get a free pass on asking dumb questions like, “Do fish get thirsty?” or “Why isn’t 11 pronounced ‘onety-one’?” We can’t stop people from teasing you until the cows come home (what time is that again?), but we can tell you it’s allowed on this day. In the US, Ask a Stupid Question Day’s default day is today, September 28, but it’s usually observed on the last school day in September. But why?!? Who started this nonsense?Teachers. And….

We had a sit-down with Smarty crew members, Caroline Roweton, Associate Product Manager, and Landon Fackrell, Software Engineer, and delved into Smarty's innovative new Excel plugin. This powerful tool makes address validation easier than ever, allowing users to clean and verify their address data directly within Excel. With a focus on simplicity and efficiency, Caroline and Landon talked about the features and benefits of the plugin, demonstrating how it can save time and enhance data accuracy without any need for coding.

Webinar recap: We recently hosted a webinar that featured a detailed demonstration of our Excel plugin for address validation, showcasing its powerful capabilities. If you use Excel and need to validate addresses, this is for you. Introducing the Excel pluginOur Excel plugin is designed for simplicity and ease of use, allowing users to validate addresses without any coding skills. By highlighting a range of addresses, the plugin batches them, sends them to Smarty, and returns formatted data directly in the spreadsheet.

In our recent webinar, we invited Easton Gibson, one of our US Street API software engineers, to discuss key features of address validation and give insights into the functionalities of both strict and enhanced modes. Understanding strict modeStrict mode is precisely what it sounds like—it rigorously validates addresses against the official USPS database, ensuring that only fully accurate, postal-verified addresses are accepted. This mode is typically used for operations requiring high precision, such as legal or financial document dispatch.

In the fast-paced and competitive world of telecommunications, where high customer expectations and intense rivalry prevail, the strategic use of address data intelligence, including geocoding and address verification, is increasingly essential. For professionals in the telecom sector, understanding and utilizing these tools can significantly streamline operations, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business growth. This article delves into how Smarty's address data solutions address common pain points in the telecom industry.

With over 240 countries supported, each with unique address formats, language variations, and data complexities, verifying international addresses is no simple task. We recently hosted a webinar about the slippery mess of standards and exceptions that make up international address data. We brought in experts Caroline Roweton, product manager, and Acacia Warner, a backend software engineer, to guide attendees through the maze of mastering international address verification. Crumbling under bad address data International addresses may appear straightforward on the surface, but chaotic complexities lurk underneath.

In our previous post, we prescribed solutions to the problems associated with having bad address data in the software side of healthcare. If you would like to go over those again, or if you stumbled upon Post 3 before the previous blogs, you can read Post 1 or Post 2 now. In this third and final installment, we hope to provide even more solutions to healthcare hiccups on the SaaS side. Software and real-time data go hand in handPreviously, we discussed how many healthcare companies are struggling to keep up with their data storage and why it’s essential to clean up the mess.

Software in the healthcare industryIn our previous post, we diagnosed the problems associated with having bad address data in the world of healthcare. If you would like to go over those again, or if you stumbled upon Post 2 before Post 1, you can read about those problems here. In this second installment, you'll learn about the solutions to those problems from a software development standpoint. As you may already know, the healthcare system often relies on robust software systems to keep patient’s electronic health records and billing in the same place.

Why accurate addresses matter to healthcare professionalsThe healthcare system typically relies on human entry for its data entry. Whether the information is added by the customer, a receptionist, a nurse, or even a doctor, there are a lot of areas for the information to be misentered. Not only that, but hospital staff members frequently edit or enter additional information following the patient's first visit. The constant editing and entering of data by a human results in more than just a tiny typo now and again.

Did you miss our recent webinar on how to use our new Google Sheets and Excel plugins for address validation? Don't worry; we've got you covered. This blog post provides an in-depth summary, highlighting essential functionalities, setup processes, and answers to some pertinent questions raised during the webinar. The basicsWe want to make it easier for businesses to validate addresses and retrieve necessary data efficiently. While we do have a bulk validation tool that can be accessed as a demo or a full tool, we find that most people are already working with address data in a spreadsheet form, usually in Excel.

Did you know that something as simple as a mistyped address could open you and your customers up to potential fraud?Fraud can take a huge bite out of your profits, as well as lead to reputation damage and other risks. It takes most companies an average of 14 months to catch on to fraud happening, resulting in average losses of $8,300 a month. However, you can take steps to reduce fraud, risk, and reputation damage by implementing address verification. 4 common types of address-related fraudCommercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) scamsCriminals use Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRA) to bilk customers for purchases of misrepresented or nonexistent products and services.

On average, customers of Smarty process 2. 5 billion addresses collectively a day. If you were to count a single Cheeto for each address, that’s enough Cheetos to fill up 1,930 vans per day. If you were to start walking along the equator of the Earth and you took one step for each address, you’d make 38 trips around the planet. That’s a ton of address lookups. So with that much address data flying through our systems, we decided to host a webinar sharing some of the insights we’ve gained from the over 440 billion addresses that were validated in 2022.

Certain surprises are fun. Finding out the person in front of you at Starbucks paid for your coffee? Java-tastic! Finding out you've been shipping products to addresses that don't exist? That's a postal catastrophe. Luckily, many shipping snafus can be prevented by using address validation software. Address validation (or verification) is the process of checking a mailing address against an authoritative address database. If the address matches an address in the known database, it is marked “valid”—meaning it's real.

There are many problems you may run into if you're working with address data. In our recent webinar, our own Adam Charlton went over some of the challenges he's encountered the most, and how to deal with them. Here’s some of what he talked about. You can view the full recording at the link below. StandardizationStandardizing addresses helps solve many of the problems inherent in data blending (combining two or more address databases together). To properly blend different address databases together, you need to either have an external ID correlate the two sources or have identically formatted address fields.

Parcel shipping costs have been rising since 2020. We’ve all seen inflation on the consumer end, whether we’re checking out online or paying at the gas pump. And skyrocketing freight rates have made headlines. Today, we’re going to focus on the impact of the increasing cost of shipping on your business and what you can do about it. But don’t lose hope—while we’re going to explore climbing shipment costs in this article, we’ll also chat about what your business can do to make shipping more efficient.

With innumerable formats and unfamiliar spellings, standardizing and validating global address datasets can be a real pain. But it doesn't have to be. International address validation is an essential part of virtually every business that works with international address data. But how can you keep your address data in multiple countries accurate while not wasting your time and money?In our recent webinar, Jeffrey Duncan went over the details of international address validation. You can view the recording below, or continue reading for the quick recap.

July 20, 2021 - PROVO, UTAH - SmartyStreets, a leader in location data intelligence, announces the release of the new US Address Verification - Enhanced Matching. Enhanced matching successfully verifies the messiest of addresses and includes 15 million additional valid addresses not found in the USPS address database. The new enhanced matching engine successfully validates and corrects more ill-formatted addresses than ever before. Corrections include greater varieties of misspellings, redundant text, incomplete addresses, and sloppy data.

This post contains additional data referenced from the original sex offender registry post. Records containing the following were excluded from our statistical analysis:[Click to return to article]state=?? and zip=00000 or 11111 street contains "not available" street contains "incarcerated" or "incac" or "incrc" or "incarc" street contains "prison" street contains "absconded" or "absconced" or "absc" street contains "detention" or "det" or "det ctr" or "det center" or "detain" or "dt ctr" street contains "deported" street contains "incarc" street contains "unknown" or "unk" street contains "deceas" or "deseas" street contains "jail" street contains "custody" street contains "immigration" street contains "transien" or "transnt" or "trnsnt" street contains "homeles" or "homles" street contains "inmate" street contains "out of state" street contains "xxx" street contains "failure" or "fail" street contains "fail" street contains "register" street contains "verif" street contains "behav" street contains "institut" or "inst" street is blank street contains "vicinity" street contains "fugit" street contains "no longer" street contains "correctio" or "corr" or "correct" street contains "complia" street contains "reform" street contains "block of" or "blk of" or "blk" state is blank and city contains "unk" street contains "&" street contains "underpass" street contains "offend" street contains "resident" street contains "between" city contains "unknown" AND zip contains "00000" street contains "moved" street contains "nonresident" street contains "unconfirmed" state and zip are same AND city is blank zip contains "jail" city contains "Not available" and zip is unintelligible as a zip street = city street contains " street + city + state has more than two entries street contains "complex" street contains "reincarc" city contains "convict" street contains "usp" street contains "penit" street contains "hosp" street contains "louis" and city is "St.

A deceitfully comforting illusionIn the US today, there are nearly 800,000 registered sex offenders. As part of the registration process, each sex offender is required to report their physical address to a local police department (the exact process varies from state to state). This is intended to empower the public to be able to identify where these offenders live and if one of them lives near you. Having this information, you are supposed to be able to better protect your loved ones and yourself.

While it's an unfortunate truth of of today's e-commerce world, it is one that cannot be ignored: Fraud is ever-present in online transactions. The expense of unnecessary shipping costs and human resources, disgruntled customers, and the time it takes to investigate disputes adds up. And the damage to a company's brand may result in untold amounts of lost sales. Using an address verification service (or AVS) as one of the tools in your fraud management toolbox is a smart and cost-effective move.

Must have address to playEvery month, tens of billions of apps are downloaded from the Google Play store. Users of those apps have historically had limited contact with the app developers for asking questions or lodging a complaint. And getting a response from some developers has proved to be a very difficult experience. Google briefly considered requiring app developers to provide their physical address or have their app removed from Google's play store. Providing a physical address where customer questions or complaints can be handled would work well for developers that have a separate business address.