What is address management?

Address management is the ongoing process of ensuring that addresses in your customer database are accurate and up-to-date. This seems like a relatively simple task, but a recent study undertaken by the United States Postal Service® (USPS®) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that 23.6% of all mail in the U.S. is incorrectly addressed and 2.7% of mail is completely undeliverable.

Adequately addressed

Incorrectly addressed

Undeliverable

Figure 1. Diagram showing the amount of incorrectly addressed
mail in the US (source: USPS & PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 2002)

The status quo for address management is to enter address information from multiple sources into the company's database and then verify it on the back end with a batch product.

Why verify an address on the front end?

The above-mentioned statistics make it clear that the current process is a fundamentally flawed one, but until recently it was the only option available. A new technology known as rapid addressing can increase a company's address data integrity to the highest level attainable, driving down costs and increasing efficiencies.

QAS has produced a white paper about rapid addressing entitled, "Trends in Address Management." To find out more about rapid addressing, please download this paper free of charge.

Types of address data

The addresses that enter the database fall into one of the following three categories:

	All information present and in the correct field
	The address is incorrect, but can be fixed with a batch product
	The address is incorrect and cannot be corrected by a batch product due to lack of information

This is where a batch product typically comes in to play. The batch product will go through a database and "fix" all of the addresses that it can. However, the batch process is flawed in that:

1. The database is only clean the second after the process is completed. As soon as addresses begin entering the database again, the database will contain inaccurate addresses.
2. There is no way to fix the unfixable addresses other than by contacting each customer and re-entering their address, and even then the address could be entered incorrectly a second time.

A rapid addressing product sits on the front end and helps prevent anything but correct addresses from entering your database. Through the usage of a rapid addressing product, the data-entry process has been changed so that only correct addresses are entered into your database.

Simply put, a database filled only with correct addresses can only be accomplished through combining a rapid addressing product with a batch product.