Improve Your Customer Experience With Address Verification

*Updated June 1st, 2021

When thinking about how to optimize your customer experience, address verification software may not be the first thing that comes to mind, however it could be one of the simplest and cost effective options. Customer address data is an increasing problem for various reasons. The way consumers shop is changing. The rise of subscription services and mobile purchasing has made establishing an outstanding customer experience a critical requirement for any company— and one that has a powerful impression on a brand’s perceived value. While these trends can translate into faster conversion rates and a higher customer life-time-value, they come with a complicated price tag: how do you create and maintain an efficient and consistent customer experience? Creating an exceptional eCommerce experience is crucial to any brand’s success, as customers can be unforgiving; complicated checkout pages can lead to abandoned carts and consumers stop shopping with a retailer if they experience a delay with their delivery - even when the retailer is not at fault.

In an effort to differentiate themselves in a competitive market, online retailers continuously introduce new premium features (in 2019, both Amazon and Walmart announced massive investments, upgrading their internal infrastructures to implement free one day shipping in the United States). As a result, consumers have acclimated and now expect features like transparent, fast, and free shipping from all of their online purchases. As the competition grows, logistics become increasingly complex, and margins get tighter, especially for smaller retailers struggling to keep up with the big guys.

eCommerce retailers are on the hook for their entire customer experience - and that starts with creating a seamless checkout experience. On the surface, it appears that there is little to be done that can ease this burden. However, there are a number of ways to give customers a better experience, and the simplest is with address verification software and removing inaccuracies in your customer address data.

Remove Friction with Address Verification Software

An address verification API can help you enrich and correct your customer data. These solutions allow you to programmatically correct typos, validate an address’s deliverability, and access metadata to enhance your customer insight. Implementing an address verification API allows you to save time, eliminate errors, automate manual tasks, and increase the quality of your data - at scale.

Address verification software increases your depth of customer knowledge, by creating a more detailed view into their address information such as whether their address is residential or commercial. With address verification solutions, you can:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Automatically suggest addresses, decreasing the time it takes to complete the checkout process and increasing your conversion rates.
• Reduce shipping costs: Validate customer addresses to ensure packages and mail are delivered to the right place every time. Sending undeliverable packages doubles postage costs, redelivering an order triples postage costs. Capture valid addresses to decrease your postage costs and eliminate deliverability errors.
• Cleanse and enrich your data: Normalize and deduplicate every address entered into your CRM, automating database maintenance. Enhance your understanding by programmatically capturing information like courier and deliverability restrictions.‍
• Standardize global information: Since addresses are regionally formatted, it can be a challenge to combine global data sets. Verified addresses contain metadata that allow you to consistently reference locations around the world.
• Reduce fraud: By only accepting legitimate addresses, you’ll be able to identify fraudulent activity before the transaction goes through.

The Lob Address Verification API

Lob has verified over 1 billion addresses across the globe and has helped companies like Sam’s Club, Booking.com, CapitalOne, and CouchSurfing verify addresses, cleanse customer data, and automate their direct mail campaigns. With the Lob Address Verification API, you get advanced insights and functionality that can evolve your operations. Here is a highlight of some of the capabilities that you’ll get with Lob:

• Address Auto-Complete: As customers enter their addresses, suggestions for deliverable addresses will automatically populate. This feature decreases the time it takes to complete your checkout process and ensures you’ll only ship to validated addresses.

• Intelligent Address Correction: Correct misspellings, populate missing information and format addresses to ensure your customer address book is complete and accurate.

• CASS Certified: Our software meets USPS address verification requirements. Every US address is returned with USPS metadata, which contains a lot more information than you might get from more simple or lightweight solutions. Learn more about CASS here.

• Globally Connected: Verify addresses from around the world, the Lob Address Verification API can verify addresses in 240 countries.

• Address Enrichment: Combine metadata to capture unique insights on your address book. Identify courier sorting data that can get you discounts on postage with faster delivery times. Know restrictions that can impact your courier’s ability to deliver from ZIP and address types.

• Agile + Robust Scaling: Lob Address Verification API was built with developers in mind: our solutions are well documented, and integrate with your customer data platforms. Additionally, our API is flexible and returns verifications quickly, regardless of volume.
• Address Elements: Easily add autocomplete and address verification to any HTML form in just a few minutes. With address autocomplete and verification you’ll remove typos and errors right at the point of entry. Learn more about implementing here.

Get Started with Address Verification and Improve Customer Address Data

Make inaccurate address data a thing of the past with address verification software. But to see the most improvements in your customer address data, it is important to find the right technology partner for your needs.

Lob Address Verification API enables you to send mail to the right place, at the right time— every time. We’ve seen Lob customers reduce their shipping costs by 15% and eliminate entire customer churn segments. By removing the root cause of common customer-facing problems, Lob Address Verification API has saved thousands of hours for fulfillment and support teams. With our flexible API, thorough documentation, and over 30 integration partners implementing Lob is easy, most of our customers are up and running in a single day.

Lob Address Verification can easily be added to any html checkout experience using our incredibly simple Address Elements plugin. Our technology is designed to free up your internal resources, enabling you to focus on running your operations.

• Try Lob Address Verification for free (with 300 free verifications)
• Watch the Lob Address Verification demo
• Access to API documentation

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