CEO Interview

Q. Can you tell me about Service Objects?
A. Service Objects was started about 10 years ago as a web development company. Early on, we developed sites for over 300 clients: primarily large companies that acquired customers via affiliate marketing, a channel that depends on the data that comes through its Web forms. We found that these companies were getting a lot of fraudulent sign-ups and bogus orders, and so began coming up with solutions to help them remedy this problem.

Soon, data quality became our passion and we haven’t wavered since. We moved away from developing sites altogether; designing quality tools to ensure that client data is genuine, accurate, and complete is all that we do.

Q. What kinds of products do you sell?
A. Data On Time Services (DOTS): tools to improve contact and lead data quality. In a nutshell, that means real-time Web services that instantly validate and verify contacts and leads at the point of entry. What type of Web Services? Address validation, telephone verification, e-mail validation, IP address validation, BIN validation, lead validation and many others---the technology that any company that does business on line needs to help them bring good leads in, (corrected, enhanced and appended), and keep the bad ones out.

Our goal at Service Objects is to make sure every contact, in every CRM system, is as up to date as it can be. This means, addresses are accurate and meet postal standards; this means phone numbers are related to the input contact information; and this means that e-mail addresses are working and valid.

Q. Who are some of your customers now?
A. We’re fortunate to work with some very smart companies, like American Express, Connextions, Hughes Network Systems, LendingTree, Pepsi, and others. All in all, we have over 1,700 clients and we’ve done over a billion validations from them.

Q. What problems have you solved in the last year you are proud of?
A. We're most proud of having solved the problem of relating mobile phone numbers to contacts and vice versa: we’re on top of it. In the last year we’ve added over 200 million wireless phone records to our system and now have one of the most complete phone number databases in the industry, for both wireless and landline phones. This enables us to verify unlisted, mobile, and landline telephones.

Q. Why Santa Barbara?
A. I love Santa Barbara. I believe that if we continue to be true to our mission of working hard and playing hard, we can attract top talent. We embrace all that Santa Barbara has to offer: The Fiesta parade and festivities in the summer, sunset cruises in the harbor, and on Tuesdays, practically right outside our front door, an open-air Farmer’s Market. What’s not to love?

Q. What is the future direction of Service Objects?
A. To stay the course and continue to develop new techniques to assure contact quality excellence. More and more people are doing business on line, and concerning the contact forms they use to do business, it means increased risk for human error, intentional misrepresentation, and fraud. In the future, we’ll still be here, devising new techniques to provide greater visibility of Internet users that interact with commercial sites.

Q. What is the most exciting part about running Service Objects?
A. Usually it’s pretty crazy – we utilize over 300 data sources and we process over 500 thousand transactions a day, so there is never a dull moment (laugh). I think the most exciting thing for me is to know we are "doing-good". It is satisfying to know that, because of our efforts, there is a lot less undeliverable mail, a lot less fraud, and happier sales people that benefit from the kind of quality data that our services afford them. In short, I really believe in Service Objects and that makes all the difference.