Our mission at Experian is to help our customers identify, understand and connect with their customers. This starts with having valid, trusted data to hand always – and especially during the high volume, fast paced Cyber Week.
With more consumers than ever choosing to shop online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Experian saw the volume of validation requests received over Cyber Week 2020 and 2021 more than double compared to 2019. In 2021, our solutions validated 207 million address, email and phone number requests from clients across the globe over Cyber Week – 37.5 million on Black Friday alone, with response time running at under 200ms. With 100% up time despite unprecedented demand, and systems running at 434 validations a second, it was a clear indication of the reliance businesses have on their data validation infrastructure, which helps them to:
- Trust data: as new customers register, existing customers update details and consumer demand skyrockets, it’s vital to trust the data going into your systems
- Deliver goods efficiently: confirm addresses are deliverable, pinpoint location co-ordinates for efficient route planning, and minimise the risk and expense of failed deliveries
- Understand data: maximise the value of the data in your system by profiling it to boost understanding, targeting and planning
Our flagship postal address validation product, Experian Address Validation, delivers across each of these points. It’s powered by the most authoritative data and precision technology to quickly validate, standardise and enrich postal addresses through a secure a REST API (also known as RESTful API) built on industry best practice. In other words, the technology helps to:
- Improve conversion rates – reduce the time taken to enter an address by up to 80% and provide a smooth user experience during address completion
- Reduce failed deliveries – Capture valid and complete addresses for 245 countries and enrich with geocodes to reduce postal costs and undelivered mail
- Save time and budget – Validate addresses at point of entry to reduce costly, manual data updates and corrections
- Understand your customers – Build a unique, holistic view of your customers for better segmentation by enriching addresses with location, business and consumer insights
Crucial to Cyber Week is confidence in the robustness of the solution as well as in your data. Last year our solutions experienced no down time during Cyber Week and building on that success, we’ve recently taken steps to enhance product performance. With speed and scalability essential to deliver the best customer experience over Black Friday and beyond, we’ve improved our technical infrastructure and boosted the resilience and performance of the product, so it’ll continue to withstand peak volumes without compromising on customer experience.
Top four features and enhancements to Experian’s address validation solution:
Multiple ways to search: Our customers shared feedback that they want to choose the way addresses are entered, searched for and formatted – so we’ve added new ways to do just that. There are five pre-set formats to choose from: autocomplete, validate, singleline, typedown and lookup. If they’re not right for you there’s also support for custom address layouts – so you get a single solution wherever addresses are captured.
High powered autocomplete functionality: Autocomplete intelligently predicts and pinpoints an address as the user types, crucial for keeping customers moving through registration and check out while ensuring address accuracy. We’ve enhanced fuzzy matching logic to counteract abbreviations and misspellings, added the latest trusted address data, and improved location biasing for North America. That means 6 million more addresses in our database, more relevant address suggestions and faster form completion.
Boosted data enrichment: It’s more important than ever to build and maintain a complete, detailed customer profile for logistics, marketing and daily business operations. With a suite of new enrichment datasets, it’s easy to enhance data and add a wealth of insights to make more informed decisions about your customers.
Simple, fast deployment and seamless integration: We’ve updated and streamlined our technical documentation and API response codes so it’s easier than ever to integrate the address validation API into any application or website.
With Experian Address Validation, you get the best real-time address validation solution in the market. Ever-improving, fast, accurate, easy to integrate, flexible and truly global – it’s Cyber Week ready.
Contact us if you’re interested in applying address validation services to your business.