What is address cleansing software?
Insight on how address cleansing works and why it is useful for business applications
How does Address Cleansing work?
Address cleansing is the process of matching, correcting and validating addresses against official authoritative address sources such as the New Zealand Post's Postal Address File (PAF) and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) Address Data.
Addy uses several rules and algorithms to cleanse addresses. For example, fuzzy address matching can help to identify and correct spelling mistakes.
Visit our blog to view a list of common address matching techniques for cleansing addresses.
Addy uses several rules and algorithms to cleanse addresses. For example, fuzzy address matching can help to identify and correct spelling mistakes.
Visit our blog to view a list of common address matching techniques for cleansing addresses.
Address cleansing benefits
Applications often validate, capture and store customer data differently, leading to duplicate, inconsistent and fragmented information that can be difficult to reconcile.
Using Address Cleansing Software to correct and standardise customer information can have many benefits such as:
Using Address Cleansing Software to correct and standardise customer information can have many benefits such as:
- A complete, consistent, single view of a customer
- A reduction in support issues for a business
- An improved customer experience
- Insights on customer behaviour and customer profiles
- Increase confidence that address data is reliable and accurate
Cleansed addresses enables uniformity, consistency and de-duplication, making it easy to match customer sales and transactional data across distributed systems and databases.
Why would your business need to cleanse addresses?
Use the list below to guide your decision around the benefits of using address cleansing software:
- Reduce undelivered and duplicate mail with a higher statement of accuracy (SoA)
- Establish a single customer view through address matching performed across databases
- Allocate a DPID, LINZ or Addy ID against customer addresses to easily remove duplication
- Populate missing address fields such as postal codes, cities and suburbs
- Standardise address data with a consistent format (e.g. use of abbreviations such as Road vs Rd)
- Accurately conduct sales and opportunity analysis based on suburbs, towns and cities groups
- Enrich customer data by matching it with other datasets such as Statics New Zealand Meshblock Data
- Visualise customer addresses on a map using geographical coordinates and reverse geocoding
- Comply with New Zealand Post address formats
- Increase compatibility and interoperability between systems and organisations
How would your business perform bulk / batch address cleansing?
An easy option is to download Addy's Microsoft Excel worksheet, extract / copy and paste your addresses into the Excel spreadsheet and click on the match button to cleanse and validate all of your customer addresses in one go.
The Excel worksheet works by calling the address validation API (also known as the address correction API) to perform address matching against Addy's secure, encrypted online address service.
Developers can also automate the address cleansing process or perform regular address matches by calling the address validation API programmatically.
Once the addresses are cleansed, businesses can update the addresses in their system. By applying best practices, Addy recommend storing the original address data in case you want to identify what has changed during the cleansing process.
The Excel worksheet works by calling the address validation API (also known as the address correction API) to perform address matching against Addy's secure, encrypted online address service.
Developers can also automate the address cleansing process or perform regular address matches by calling the address validation API programmatically.
Once the addresses are cleansed, businesses can update the addresses in their system. By applying best practices, Addy recommend storing the original address data in case you want to identify what has changed during the cleansing process.
How can your business maintain accurate addresses going forward?
Once addresses are matched and cleansed, your business can maintain highly accurate addresses by using an address finder tool to validate and match addresses in real time, as a user types, against the official NZ Post and LINZ datasets.
Addy provides a range of free, ready-made address validation plugins for JavaScript and eCommerce stores such as WooCommerce and BigCommerce to validate, match and autocomplete address fields when users fill in your online form.
Addy provides a range of free, ready-made address validation plugins for JavaScript and eCommerce stores such as WooCommerce and BigCommerce to validate, match and autocomplete address fields when users fill in your online form.
Which address fields are available during address matching?
Addy provides a comprehensive list of address fields such as:
- Building Name, Unit Type and Number
- Street Number, Full Street Name or Box Number
- Suburb or 'RD and RD Number' or Box Lobby
- Town, City and Mail Town
- Postcode
- Region and Territory
- GPS Coordinates
Visit the Address Cleansing page to see a complete list of all the address fields that are available.
An address validation API as a cleansing engine
Addy's Address Validation API simplifies the process of matching and validating addresses. The API takes partial, incomplete and misspelled addresses as an input from your database, match them against Addy's address validation engine, and produce an output of cleansed addresses.
Cleansed addresses are complimented with unique address identifiers that can be mapped to official address databases such as the New Zealand Postal Address File's (PAF) Unique Delivery Point Identifier (DPID), Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) street address database and Statistics New Zealand Meshblocks.
Cleansed addresses are complimented with unique address identifiers that can be mapped to official address databases such as the New Zealand Postal Address File's (PAF) Unique Delivery Point Identifier (DPID), Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) street address database and Statistics New Zealand Meshblocks.
How would your business perform bulk / batch address cleansing?
Sign up for an address validation account and head over to the address cleansing page to start the easy journey towards accurate, quality address data.
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