What is address verification?
Address verification is an automated software tool that determines whether or not a postal or physical address is valid. The process involves the following steps:
- Analyze the input address to determine the country of origin and its component parts.
- Determine the pattern or structure of the component parts (a process knows as NLP or Natural Language Processing).
- Compare the component parts to a referential database of known valid addresses for the target country.
- Determine whether the input address matches a unique known address at a high level of confidence.
- If a unique match is found, correct any incorrect components of the address, resulting in a correctly formatted address using the standards of the given country.
- Assign a validity code (e.g. Valid or Invalid).
Why is address verification important?
Global addresses are highly complex. Formats vary from country to country, and different writing systems or alphabets make capture and data storage difficult.
Poor address quality can result in numerous problems for an organization:
- Invalid or incorrectly structured addresses can cause duplicate customer records in a database or CRM
- Undeliverable addresses can result in the inability to reach customers
- Slow or undeliverable mail, which increases costs and reduces marketing impact and efficiency
- Reduced ROI on your marketing investments
- Poor brand image due to incomplete or inaccurate addresses in customer communication
Problems with address accuracy can originate from a number of different causes:
- Data entry error
- Uncertainty regarding the correct way to structure or format an address
- Incorrectly designed address capture forms
- Errors caused during transfer of data or data mappings between IT systems
- Extract, transform and load processes (ETL) that don’t respect proper address formats
- Poor data governance
Verifying and improving global customer addresses can result in many benefits:
- Prevent or eliminate duplicate records from your CRM
- Eliminate wasted marketing spend caused by undeliverable mail
- Improve brand image and customer experience
- Deliver the best possible data quality to corporate data users
- Maximize marketing and IT return on investment (ROI)
What is email verification?
Email verification is an automated software tool that determines whether or not an email address is valid. The process involves the following steps:
- Analyze the input email address to determine whether the format meets the published standard for a correctly formed email address.
- Parse (separate) the input email address into its two component parts, the local-part (the value to the left of the @ symbol), and the domain (the value to the right of the @ symbol).
- Validate the domain to determine whether it’s a correct domain that can accept SMTP (email) communications.
- Validate the local-part, or user name, to determine whether the user name is a valid recipient at the domain.
- Check whether the email address is a known fraudulent email, whether it belongs to a catch-all domain, a free email service, and similar checks.
- Assign validity codes indicating the outcome of the above checks.
What is phone verification?
Phone verification is an automated software tool that determines whether or not a phone number is valid. Phone verification determines the following information:
- The country where the phone number is registered
- Whether or not the phone number is of the the correct length and is a valid number in the given country
- The type of the phone number, such as a mobile phone or a land line
- The telephony provider where the phone number is registered
- The geographical location where the phone number is registered
What makes Global-Z unique?
Global-Z has been delivering global data quality services for over 30 years. We were one of the first innovators in the industry to develop global data verification solutions, and have remained true to that vision ever since.
Because we develop our own technology, we have a superior level of understanding of the complex issues involving global customer data. We’ve leveraged that knowledge to build some of the largest and most successful customer data quality systems in the world. Today our clients can benefit from our knowledge excellence in a number of ways:
- Expert data analysis during the new client intake process, to tune our automated interfaces to work best with your data
- Data profiling and analysis through our bureau services
- Our Data Quality Assessment tool, which offers a detailed analysis of your data and provides a baseline of data quality, either during pre-launch or as a one-off project
- Consulting services to assist you with a range of data quality solutions across the data lifecycle
- Service and support throughout our customer lifecycle. If you have questions about your data, we are the people to ask.
How does Global-Z’s pricing work?
Our pricing is super simple, we offer 3 straightforward plans:
- Pay as you go, purchasing only the number of transactions you need. Credits never expire.
- Or pay monthly for only those transactions you’ve processed*.
- Enterprise plans are available for high volume users, customized services, or custom pricing plans.
That’s it. If you’re not sure which is the right plan for you, contact us and we’ll be happy to help build a plan for you.
*Monthly payments require credit qualification
Do I need to commit to a long-term contract?
No, our standard agreement auto-renews and you can cancel anytime without penalty.
Are Global-Z’s services secure?
Yes, we utilize industry-standard information security controls and measures, including end-to-end encryption in all data transfers and a host of other technical and organizational measures. See our security certifications and credentials here.
Does Global-Z have any data privacy or security certifications?
Global-Z’s automated services are certified to ISO 27001:2013, which is considered the gold standard of information security by most European Data Protection Authorities. We undergo regular internal and external audits and IT penetration testing by independent auditors who verify the integrity and effectiveness of our data protection controls and management systems.
We are also self-certified the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S.Privacy Shield frameworks. You can find our self-certification verification here.
Our staff are also certified to a variety of quality and compliance industry standards including CIPM, ITIL, Lean Six Sigma, and Scrum.
You can read a case study of our ISO 27001:2013 certification here, and you can find our ISO Certificate here.
Are Global-Z’s services GDPR compliant?
Yes, all of our services are GDPR compliant. We take data privacy and compliance seriously, and work hard to protect our customers and your valuable data.
During the new customer intake process, if Global-Z will be processing any data in GDPR scope, we and our customer will sign a GDPR Data Protection Agreement which spells out the scope and the terms of processing that we are authorized to perform, as well any cross-border data transfer protection provisions.
Global-Z also offers the option of data processing hosted in the EU for customers who require that their data remain in region.
Where does Global-Z get its reference data and how often is it updated?
We license reference data from a mix of providers, both public and private, and we prioritize data accuracy and cost in all of our data licensing activities. Most address reference data is licensed from postal operators in each country, however we also use private data providers and third party software components to supplement those data sets.
Referential data is updated as frequently as possible, typically on a monthly basis for most data sources. Data updates are managed by our product team and are completely invisible to the customer. We always ensure that the most complete and most current data we have is in production immediately.
The data landscape is rapidly evolving, and we’re constantly evaluating existing and new sources of data to improve our products.
What type of customer support does Global-Z offer?
All Global-Z customers and pricing plans include unlimited phone and email support from our dedicated team of data specialists. Our customer support and customer satisfaction scores are among the highest in the industry, with a Net Promoter Score of 72. Our customers choose to work with us because of our deep knowledge and best in market technology, but our customers stay with us, often for decades, because of our amazingly strong support and our willingness to go the extra mile to help our customers.
What kind of a contract do I need to sign?
Before you get started, you’ll need to agree to our standard terms and conditions, which includes the terms and conditions of our data suppliers.
In addition, if your data is in GDPR scope, you will also need to sign a GDPR Data Protection Agreement.
That’s it.
No long term commitments are required, you can cancel your agreement at any time.
How do I get started?
Easy, Click here
READY TO LEARN MORE?
Schedule a demo to see how our global contact data verification works in realtime.
