Companies, ecommerce businesses and professionals can benefit enormously from the validation and geocoding of postal addresses. In frequent and purely technical operations, like data entry, or for specific task objectives, like sending advertising material to a precise geographical area, can really take advantage on address validation and geocoding through specific software or an online portal; these substantial benefits can’t be matched by any other IT system, much less manual. Let’s just think what happened about twenty years ago, when the correction and insertion of postal addresses was still done by hand by secretaries and employees. Over time, technology has made great progress, reducing the margin of error and speeding up the work of millions of people around the world.
The increase in security on the one hand and the reduction of timing on the other are not the only advantages associated with address validation and geocoding performed with software like ours. Alongside these two very important results, it is indeed necessary to keep in mind lesser known, but no less decisive, aspects. It is clear that validation and geocoding – i.e. cleansing up one or more addresses and then turning them into geographical coordinates – have very different applications (with more or less evident advantages depending on the scenario in which we are), but some advantages deserve to be explained and argued in more detail so even the most inexperienced users have the opportunity to evaluate the offer of a complete validation and geocoding service without doubts and possible misunderstandings. Find out for yourself what benefits you could get from these processes!
1) LESS WASTE OF RESOURCES, TIME AND MONEY
As it is easy to guess, the first and most immediate advantage of a validation of postal addresses concerns the optimization of resources, time and money spent to manage your own work and your company’s work. In every business sector, the use of validation software ensures a substantial cut in waste in favor of greater efficiency and a net increase in performance. Operations that were previously managed by two or three people can be carried out in a few steps by a single person in charge, leaving the bulk of the checks and corrections to the validation and geocoding program. In this case, the system takes care of everything we want, from the normalization of the addresses to the merging of duplicates, from the translation of postal data into other languages to the transliteration into alphabets other than the original one. All much faster than the fastest computer specialist.
2) A WIDER CHOICE OF AVAILABLE SERVICES
Streamlining your workload doesn’t just mean saving time and lowering business costs. The issue should be seen in a broader sense, even considering the services related to the validation and geocoding activities in and of themselves. While a real person, as well as a computer program not expressly dedicated to validation and geocoding, limit their intervention to the correction of the data and the search for the corresponding geographic coordinates, software like Address4 can do much, much more. A few examples?
– Formatting the postal address
Among the tasks that we can perform quickly and safely through a validation and geocoding program, is formatting a postal address, an operation that involves transcribing the address in the format provided by the postal system of the target country. Here is a concrete example of what happens when an input address is entered, cleansed and formatted:
Geocoding addresses via Google Maps
This service takes advantage of Google for the massive geocoding of addresses and allows you to obtain the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of a database containing up to hundreds of thousands of postal addresses. The worldwide coverage (over 250 countries) and lots of integration possibilities make this service particularly effective for anyone looking for quality and precision.
Reverse geocoding (from coordinates to postal address)
Geocoding allows us to obtain geographic coordinates from a postal address, while reverse geocoding allows us to reverse the process and get us a complete address starting from a match of latitude and longitude. Even in this case, the operation is possible from any device, including smartphones and tablets.
3) MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY OF TIME AND WORK
Working with the latest generation validation and geocoding software allows you to get greater flexibility in working hours. Indeed, as in the case of Address4, you can access the program 24/7 directly online, even on holidays and weekends. There are no unexpected events: when you need it, Address4 is always active and at your complete disposal to process new data. Just enter your credentials in the system (account login page) and access the dashboard in real time. It doesn’t matter if the office where computers are kept is closed: each user and collaborator can carry out validation and geocoding operations autonomously even at home or remotely.
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4) DIRECT COMMUNICATIONS AND TARGETED MARKETING
When the databases owned by the company or the professional are corrected and updated, the potential of the business can only grow. The postal address is part of the data that intercepts customers and comes into play every time one needs to send a paper communication, a request for data updates or other. There are numberless examples of this type, and they include:
– electricity, water and gas supply companies for charge notices, self-reading requests, supply suspensions for works, etc.
– Vehicle Inspection Stations for the renewal of a vehicle license
– medical clinics to inform about ongoing promotions
– ecommerce businesses for sending paper catalogs
– gardening and industrial cleaning services
– and other.
Mailing can be done on the basis of the most promising sectors of a town (i.e. where there are more villas and gardens, or where there are more houses, or more companies in a certain industrial sector, or where there are only condominiums, etc.). This type of information can be obtained easily by processing and refining the owned data.
5) POSSIBLE UPDATING OF OBSOLETE DATABASE
Validation is often thought of in an exclusively future perspective to carry out operations that will be useful over months or even years. Nothing could be more wrong: almost all companies have databases and archives of postal addresses with information that is no longer up-to-date and, therefore, at risk of obsolescence. Recovering this information through validation and possible geocoding means taking advantage immediately of a commercial resource that would decay over time. To avoid this possibility, partial or total address cleansing can be started immediately even online.
6) ENHANCEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT OF CUSTOMER CARE
Customer service can be enhanced in many ways. One of the least known is profiling, an approach that leads to the enrichment of the personal data of each customer or potential customer, thanks to the integration of further, more complete and detailed information. The postal address, properly verified and updated, is a piece of additional information that can make the difference in the relationship between the company and the customer on issues ranging from returning a product to sending a test sample. In all cases, the knowledge of the customer and their location (domicile, residence, workplace) are useful to create a faster and more precise assistance service.
7) A MORE MODERN AND MORE EFFICIENT USER EXPERIENCE
The last advantage that deserves attention concerns the users’ experience when they visit a website or an ecommerce business, as well as when they use a page or a virtual space that collect their data. The online shop is the most emblematic case, but there are dozens of other situations in which the end user experience can be facilitated, thanks to the integration of a system that includes suggestion and verification of data. This usually happens through a pre-filled form: Address4, once again, is programmable for the perfect integration into CMS such as WordPress, Joomla!, Shopify and so forth. The integration can also be implemented via API, so as to make validation and geocoding possible in any environment and system. Curious to try without any obligation or credit card?
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