View From the Top by Ray Melissa Founder & CEO
In an Uncertain Time, Active Data Quality Delivers Trust.The COVID-19 pandemic created a trying time for everyone. Demand for the delivery of essential goods and services has surged. Many companies have focused on increasing their ecommerce capabilities while others are improving the efficiency of sales and marketing efforts in an unsettled market. No matter how companies choose to pivot, we’ve seen an increasing need on all fronts for address verification and data matching to ensure people actually reside where they say they do. Now, more than ever, address verification is seen as a basic building block of trust. A systematic approach to checking that addresses are valid and phone numbers and email addresses are current can save time and money and operate as a “sanity check” on last-mile efforts to deliver goods or marketing to consumers.
However, customer and client data are volatile and decay up to 30% annually. People and businesses move—33 million in the U.S. alone last year—and other life changes such as death, divorce, new household information, new jobs and the birth of children make it challenging to maintain accurate and timely data. That’s why companies are increasingly interested in “active” checking to complement or even replace “passive” rules-based checking. Active checking is corroborated by multiple authorities, like the telephone company, the postal address system and various government systems. We use multi-source reference data that’s curated and meant to be accurate in the real world, so when customer data is examined during an “active” check, you’re much more likely to trust it.
Melissa
www.melissa.com