Quality of the data in the addresses of our clients, Do we measure it?

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Businesses almost always realize the problem when the damage has already occurred and they have angry customers. But nevertheless, Most companies think that measuring the quality of addresses is a very expensive job and that is why they do not do it.

But besides the problem of sending documentation or notifications to wrong addresses, There is also the problem of poor analysis of information with Business Intelligence tools.. The address is often a fundamental component of the customer's identity.

Importance of Quality in the addresses

The data of the addresses of our clients have to do with their real life, so if they are not entered correctly in their systems, Customers will no longer receive important documents like contracts, invoices or even products that have been ordered from you and that you have agreed to ship on time.. An error in these directions produces dissatisfied customers, and this ends up translating into problems and increased costs. These are some of the problems they can cause:

• Loss of money: you will have to process returns and new deliveries for products that have not reached their destination due to an error in the addresses. And what is more, your customer service department will have to deal with complaints therefore, You cannot be dedicating yourself to other types of more productive services. All these costs are compounded if your client is also from outside your country.

• Loss of clients: having dissatisfied customers who are late or never delivered products or documents, may cause you to pay the highest price possible: lose customers. When you miss deadlines, the customer is disappointed, and that is very difficult to solve with many initiatives that you can implement. What's more, with the use of social networks, word of mouth can also influence other customers who have not yet been affected for these mistakes.

• Problems with your marketing strategy: have directions, wrong emails and phone numbers, your marketing strategy will fail, which will not only result in unsatisfactory results but will also have wasted pointless time and money.

How can we measure the quality of the addresses?

Although the quality of the addresses is a complex idea, This quality can be measured without the need for many complications.. It is important follow the entire process in which the addresses of our clients intervene, from the moment the data is entered into the system, until we start to have problems like delivery failures. If we follow the whole process, it is possible to identify when addresses are used and therefore it is possible to measure and obtain a quality indicator.

We are going to see three measures that can help you improve the quality of the addresses.

Measure return issues due to wrong addresses

A simple first indicator is count the number of returns your business processes in a specified period. When there is a return with an incorrect address you must register it.

At the end of the period you want to measure, should compare the number of returns you have due to wrong addresses with the number of total returns what's in your company. In this way you will get an idea of ​​the seriousness of the quality problem in the addresses of your clients.

If you also multiply the cost of each return and the new shipment by the number of returns for incorrect addresses, you will be calculating what this incorrect data costs your company.

Please measure the data before shipment

The problem with the above method is that it is measuring when the damage is done. The customer will already be unhappy.

Another possibility is measure data directly from your systems. It's about enter addresses into some data quality product for addresses, as AddressDoctor from Informatica, and let the software verify the accuracy. You won't be able to fix a bug by exchanging addresses with another customer but at least you make sure the shipping addresses exist.

See the accuracy and precision of your tools

Related to the previous section, It is also advisable to measure the correct functioning of the tools we use to verify addresses. For this we can generate a list of addresses that we know are accurate and that they are confirmed, making sure there is no address where a delivery cannot be made.

Now add a list of wrong addresses to that list, eliminating countries, provinces, modifying zip codes, entering spelling errors in the streets or changing the data. In this way we will also have data that we know that the system must tell us that they are not valid addresses.

Once we have the list of correct and incorrect addresses we enter it in the tool we use to verify addresses and check its result. If you don't like what you get, you can try another address verification tool to see which one is more efficient.