What is Address Accuracy / Address Validation and why is it important?

Address Accuracy is a process mandated by the postal authority designed to improve mail delivery by encouraging mailers to accurately address mail. In Canada it is known as the Software Evaluation and Recognition Program (SERP) and has been in place since 1992. Address validation (also known as address verification) is the implementation of this process which requires the use of postal authority approved software to validate, correct, format and otherwise manage address data. Compliance with this program enables Canada Post customers to benefit from incentive postage rates.

An address is considered valid when all the components of an address are present and correct. This involves matching the address against a database of valid addresses, such as the Canada Post address database.

The goal of address validation is to ensure that business / personal mail, parcels, or communications reach their intended recipients without delays or errors caused by incorrect or incomplete address information.

Address validation is an essential tool for business.
Its benefits include:

  • Data quality – maximize the value of the data collected.
  • Cost reduction – access to postal discounts, reduced rework.
  • Minimize returned mail.
  • Improved analytics - expanded opportunities / targeted marketing.
  • Improved efficiency – critical for e-commerce and parcel delivery.
  • Improved customer satisfaction – deliver once the first time.

If Address Accuracy is so important, what steps can be taken or processes implemented, to improve our data?

We’re glad you asked, keep reading to learn about our approach and tools.

360⁰ Canadian Address Accuracy Lifecycle Management

Maintaining address quality is NOT a one-time clean-up process but an on-going requirement. Every address which flows into your systems should first be processed through address validation / correction software. This is a fundamental data quality control – otherwise we have the old adage – garbage in = garbage out. Even with all these controls, we still must consider that the reference database used for address validation from CPC is updated monthly. New addresses are added monthly, postal codes are retired, municipality amalgamations require address adjustments, etc. We must therefore close the loop on our process and regularly re-validate our addresses.

Let’s break this down into bite-sized pieces.

The first step is to implement address validation tools at all data entry points. There are many approaches to this, but the leading current technology is to use an autocomplete address API. This will provide keystroke by keystroke validation as a user types an address. You can try it here.

There are many customizable options associated with the StreetPerfect autocomplete API which you can find here.

Once all address entry points are “protected” with address validation it’s time to review the pre-existing addresses in the db. There is little benefit in doing this first, since unverified addresses will continue to be loaded into the db.

Validating the existing addresses is typically a batch process. These addresses are extracted from the db and processed through the StreetPerfect batch utility program. This program will efficiently process any number of records and create a series of reports and output data files.

You can see more details of our Batch processing here.

So far so good – everything seems straight-forward. But as usual there is a bump in the road. Correcting address data is a combination of science and art. The batch process described will not be able to correct all addresses. There are many reasons for this including:

  1. Missing critical address elements (Eg. Apt numbers)
  2. Software may not violate CPC address correction rules
    1. Input address postal code associated with even street numbers while input street number is odd. Software can only make suggestions but cannot correct.
  3. Unresolvable ambiguities - Input address missing postal code and street direction and multiple possibilities are found.
    1. 100 KING ST E and 100 KING ST W
  4. Malformed address info, extraneous or missing information, resulting in ambiguous results from parsing

The only solution to correct some of these, is to contact the recipient. But others may be correctable with human input. Here we need to provide a tool to help people efficiently evaluate the address and assess whether it can be corrected. We have developed a custom application – StreetPerfect Visual Corrector - which will take the not correctable output results from the batch process and present them to a user while providing them the ability to use the full StreetPerfect API set to attempt to correct the address.

Contact us for a demo of this software

  1. Intake validation (interactive / batch)
  2. Review validation result using StreetPerfect reports and / or our custom software tool – StreetPerfect Visual Corrector - to help correct non-correctable addresses
  3. Save results
  4. Reprocess address data at regular intervals to maintain address accuracy

Regardless of intake source or technology, addresses coming into your systems should be processed through address validation software at data entry time.

This powerful functionality has been implemented using our Robust real-time StreetPerfect address validation API toolkit. This API suite provides unmatched address management functionality.

Integration of our RESTful APIs is straightforward with the interactive demo / test Swagger environment. For more information see Easy integration with REST API and SDKs here.