If you are a marketing, order fulfillment or data manager, there are some things you don’t want to be greeted with when you come to work in the morning – and a surprising number of them revolve around...
Today I am writing about the ways to integrate with Service Objects APIs. This will be different from our other discussions where we talk about running batches and hooking up our APIs in code. Here I am...
A little bit of summertime fun with the Bard and data quality. "What’s in a NAPE? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” -William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet OK,...
Data quality is very important. But that doesn’t always mean it is clear to everyone. In this blog article, I’d like to offer some strategies for discussing it with all the less-technical people in...
Pricing is - by far - the most common question asked when we start talking with prospective customers. And of course, we understand that you need to know the costs as part of your decision-making process....
We have many mission-critical applications for our products. But every year in May, one of the most critical ones is keeping moms happy on Mother’s Day. After all, customer satisfaction is important in...
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you know that data privacy and security laws have become a big thing worldwide. Between Europe’s GDPR regulation, Canada’s PIPEDA...
Change is a constant in life. And when it comes to your data, even more so. Given enough time, migrating your data to new systems and platforms will be a fact of life for most businesses. Whether it...
If you do business with customers in Canada, an important new privacy law has taken effect as of November 2018: The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). People are already...
With 2018 coming to a close in just a few short weeks, we enter our busiest time of year validating millions of deliveries for our customers every day. Just like Santa’s elves, we’ve been preparing for...
Once upon a time, many businesses simply lived with bad email addresses as an inevitable cost of doing business. Today this has changed dramatically, in the face of increasing costs and regulatory...
Few marketing channels share the power of email. It is immediate, urgent, personalized and inexpensive. And according to the Direct Marketing Association, it has the highest ROI of any marketing channel:...
The old saying “garbage in, garbage out” has been around since the early days of modern computing. Code for operator error or bad data, the adage implies that the output of a program is only as good as...
Enterprises are dealing with more data than ever before, which means that proper information architecture and storage is crucial. What’s more, the quality of the data you store affects your business more...
We talk a lot on these pages about how data quality affects your business. But once in a while, we also feel it is important to look at how data quality affects society as a whole. And one of the best...
Here is a question that potential customers often ask: is it easier or more cost-effective to use data validation services such as ours, versus building and maintaining in-house capabilities? We are a...
Labor Day is much more than the traditional end of summer in America: it pays tribute to the efforts of working people. It dates back well over a century, with one labor leader in the 1800s describing it...
What do you think of when you hear the term “artificial intelligence” (or AI for short)? For many people, it conjures up images of robots, science fiction, and movies like “2001 – A Space...
In a world of big data, information for sale, and people oversharing on social media, this past decade has lulled many marketers into believing in a post-privacy era of virtually unfettered access to...
Being based in the college town of Santa Barbara, California, we notice something interesting: the students seem to get younger every year. Of course, it is actually our own ages that continue to change....
If you live in the United States, you probably think that Independence Day is synonymous with the fourth of July. In reality, Independence Day holidays are celebrated around the world, commemorating...
New privacy regulations in Europe have recently become a very hot topic again within the business community. And no, we aren’t talking about the recent GDPR law. A new privacy initiative, known as the...
Data gets stale over time. You rely on us to keep this data fresh, and we in turn rely on a host of others – including you! The information we serve you is the product of partnerships at many levels, and...
If you work with data, you have certainly heard by now about GDPR: the new European Union laws surrounding consumer data privacy that went into effect May 25, 2018. But how about PIPEDA, NDB, APPI, CCPA,...
Once upon a time, customer service and support operations were viewed as the “complaint department” – a back-office function, a necessary evil, and above all a cost center whose role should be...
As the May 25, 2018, deadline looms, Service Objects, the leading provider of real-time global contact validation solutions, is offering a GDPR Data Quality Assessment to help companies evaluate their if...
Perhaps Thomas Redman’s most important recent article is “Seizing Opportunity in Data Quality.” Sloan Management Review published it in November 2017, and it appears below. Here he expands on...
We are back now with the fourth blog in our Salesforce Data Quality Tools Integration Series. In previous blogs, we covered various topics like; creating a plug-in that could be dropped on a flow, a...
In an ideal world, data entry would always be perfect. Sadly, it isn’t – human errors happen to end users and call center employees alike. And while we make a good living cleaning existing bad data...
In March 2018, Service Objects reached a major milestone in the company’s history by validating over 3 billion transactions. Since 2001, Service Objects has enabled businesses located around the world to...
I published the provocatively-titled article, “Bad Data Costs the United States $3 Trillion per Year” in September, 2016 at Harvard Business Review. It is of special importance to those who need...
A lot of you – like many of us here are Service Objects – are enjoying watching the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Korea this month. Every Olympics is a spectacle where people perform incredible...
Every year, February 14th is a time when our thoughts turn to things like true love, flowers, chocolates … and data quality. In fact, there is more in common between these things than you might think....
Many developers come to Service Objects because they recognize their company has a need for a data quality solution. Maybe you were tasked by a manager to help find a solution, perhaps someone in Marketing...
In today’s fast-paced world, customers have become more demanding than ever before. Customer-centric organizations need to build their models after critically analyzing their customers, and this requires...
With the arrival of 2018, many businesses are realizing the deadline to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is looming in the not too distant future. In fact, according to Forrester...
With Salesforce being the dominant platform in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) universe, we are excited to demonstrate how our tools can benefit the data quality of your contact data in this...
Imagine that your company runs an online ad for a product. But when your customer gets to your website, this product has actually been discontinued. And from thereon in, every time the customer surfs the...
At Service Objects, one of our Core Values is Customer Service Above All. As part of this commitment, our Application Engineers are always available to answer any technical questions from prospects and...
By the time October rolls around, the top Major League baseball teams in the country are locked in combat, in the playoffs and then the World Series. And as teams take the field and managers sit in the...
More times than not, you have to buy something to really try it. At Service Objects, we think it makes more sense to try before you buy. We are confident that our service will exceed expectations and...
If you market to or serve people by mail, there are two acronyms you should get to know: CASS and DPV. Here is a quick summary of both of them: CASS stands for the Coding Accuracy Support System™....
How well do you know your prospects and customers? This question lies at the heart of what we call data-driven marketing. Because the more you know about the people you contact, the better you can...
What is DOTS FastTax? DOTS FastTax web service provides sales and use tax rate information for all US areas based on several different inputs. The operations that are offered within FastTax take input...
The so-called Millennial generation now represents the single largest population group in the United States. If they don’t already, they will soon represent your largest base of customers, and a majority...
For most organizations, one of the most critical assets of their marketing operations is their email contact database. Email is still the lingua franca of business: according to the Radicati Group, over a...
Good marketing is the bedrock of most business’ revenue pipelines; their number one job in many instances is to generate high quality leads through a variety of channels that can be converted into sales....
History is full of famous “frenemies,” from opposing politicians to the latest Hollywood gossip – people who work closely together but get under each other’s skin. But in your workplace, one of the...
“In the era of big data and software as a service, we are witnessing a major industry transformation. In order to stay competitive, businesses have reduced the time it takes to deploy a new application...
April 22 marks the annual celebration of Earth Day, a day of environmental awareness that is now approaching its first half century. Founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 as a nationwide teach-in on...
Some things are – sadly – a fact of life. Less than a third of people floss their teeth every day. The average US household has over $16,000 in credit card debt. And according to the United States...
Service Objects is very proud to have been recently selected as one of CIOReview’s Top 20 Most Promising API Solution Providers for 2016, judged by a distinguished panel comprised of CEOs, CIOs and VPs...
Our professions don’t exempt us from real life. Doctors get sick, contractors have leaky roofs – and people who work at Service Objects receive misaddressed mail, just like the rest of us. But one...
Asking whether data quality is important to your marketing efforts is a little like asking if apple pie and motherhood are important – of course, the answer will always be “yes.” Recently, however,...
What do medical centers have in common with businesses like with Uber, Travelocity, or Amazon? They have a treasure trove of data, that's what! The quality of that data and what's done with it can help...
Everyone knows that Michael Dell built a giant computer business from scratch in a college dorm room. Less well known is how he got started: by selling newspaper subscriptions in his hometown of Houston....
In the era of big data, marketing professionals have added basic data analysis to their toolboxes. However, the data they're dealing with often requires significantly deeper analysis, and data quality (Is...
Enterprise resource planning, or ERP for short, integrates the functions of an organization around a common database and applications suite. A brainchild of the late 20th century – the term was coined by...
Imagine that someone calls your contact center – and before they even get to “Hello,” you know what they might be calling about, how frustrated they might be, and what additional products and...
If you have ever dined at a *really* fine restaurant, it may have featured a wine steward: a person formally trained and certified to oversee every aspect of the restaurant’s wine collection. A...
Service Objects recently celebrated our 15th year in business and it made me reflect on something that is important to me and is an underappreciated reason for improving your data quality: protecting our...
A new year is upon us once again. What are your resolutions for 2017? Hit the gym more often? Get organized? Improve the state of your bank account? Guess what: your data has a very similar set of...
The holidays are upon us. One of the busiest seasons for many businesses, particularly in the consumer sector. According to the National Retail Federation, as much as 40 percent of annual sales for small...
Cyber Monday shattered previous online sales records and set a new all-time high, with consumers opening their wallets and spending $3.45 billion, marking a 12.1% jump over last year's figure and earning...
Our USPS CASS Certified™ Address Validation service improves internal mail processes and delivery rates by standardizing contact records against USPS data and flagging for vacancy, addresses returning...
What is the best marketing database of all? Statistically, it is your own customers. It has long been common wisdom that existing customers are much easier to sell to than new prospects – but what you...
For many people, managing data quality seems like a daunting task. They may realize that it is an important issue with financial consequences for their organization, but they don’t know how to proceed in...
The holidays are approaching. For many merchants, this is the busiest and most profitable time of year. Especially if you sell high-ticket items that are popular as gifts. Unfortunately, the holidays are...
Salesforce is a great CRM that allows businesses to easily put customers at the center of their attention. But even a tool like Salesforce can be halted by poor quality customer data. Well, luckily for...
As a marketer, one of your jobs is to ensure that your sales team has access to high-quality leads. So how do you go about screening your lead lists for accuracy? Believe it or not, most marketers are...
Savvy marketers know just how important it is to capitalize on every customer lead. And as technology advances and our customer lists expand, so does the need to streamline our marketing campaigns and...
With apps like Facebook, Waze, and the release of iOS 9, you probably didn’t realize that your cell phone is now quietly mining data behind the scenes. Don’t be afraid, though. This isn’t big brother...
Marketing Automation and Your Contact Records: A Five Part Series That Every Marketer Can’t Miss (Part 5) Putting Your Contact Records to the Test! Now that you’ve read our series on how the quality...
Marketing automation and your contact records: A five part series that every marketer can’t miss (part 4) “Well-integrated and accurate customer data is one of the best assets marketers have at their...
Marketing automation and your contact records: A five part series that every marketer can’t miss (part 3) Welcome back! The fact that you’re interested in improving the data quality within your...
One benefit or problem, depending on your inclinations, of being in the marketing business is that you become acutely aware of the marketing that goes on around you. In many ways, that awareness is a great...
We talk a great deal about data quality, validating information, and the impact on our business. Do we ever stop and think where bad data comes from? It’s not like there is some bad part of town where...
This election year has already had its share of surprises and upsets, and it's just getting started. Political parties and individual campaigns alike are scrambling to reach out to as many members of the...
Our company recently invested in SSD (solid-state-drive) arrays for our database servers, which allowed us to improve the speed of our services. As you likely know, it's challenging to balance cost,...
A global review of data-driven marketing by GlobalDMA and the Winterberry Group found in its survey of 3,000 marketing professionals that nearly all recognize the importance of data in advertising and...
Inbound marketing and marketing automation platforms promise to make your marketing more effective, and they have the potential to live up to that promise. However, reality often tells a different story --...
When geocoding addresses, coordinate precision is not as important as coordinate accuracy. It is a common misconception to confuse high precision decimal degree coordinates with high accuracy. Precision is...
We all know garbage when we see it -- or do we? In the case of Service Objects' email validation, we have our own definition of garbage and we actively seek it out. We want to find garbage in email and...
Imagine launching an online business and associating your email address with your business domain. For example purposes, let's say your domain is XYZ.com and your name is John. Your email address would be...
Service Objects' CEO Geoff Grow recently embarked on a data adventure during his fourth trip to Palau. Ever the data enthusiast, Geoff couldn't help but wonder if the PO box numbers in that country would...
Remember when Amazon first came along? That was 20 years ago in 1995. That same year, eBay arrived -- and shopping as we formerly knew it was about to change dramatically. PayPal arrived in 2002,...
If you look up API on Wikipedia, you'll find a lengthy explanation filled with computer terms and examples. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on APIs is more than 4,000 words long. While we appreciate this...
Everyone's talking about big data and data quality services. The hubbub isn't likely to shrink any time soon because big data is only getting bigger and becoming increasingly important to rein in and...
Many of us work with databases containing row after row of contact records. We tend to think of these databases as a whole, oftentimes referring to a contact database as a "list." While you may care deeply...
Here at Service Objects, we love data almost as much as we love our dogs. Few things make us happier than exploring or talking about data. Turns out, we're not the only ones obsessed with data. Check out...
Scientists and analysts know the importance of data quality. In fact, they attend workshops focused on just that such as the recent Data Infrastructure: The Importance of Quality and Integrity workshop...
Is 2015 the year of data quality? It could be! Companies are beginning to recognize the benefits of data quality: improved customer service, better quality leads, improved deliverability, reduced costs,...
The era of big data is upon us, and it's bringing us surprising insights. Remember the Icelandic volcano eruption that grounded flights a few years ago? Data shows us that the volcano emitted 150,000 tons...
Your company likely has a CEO, COO, and CFO. It might even have a CRO and a CISO, but does it have a CDQO (Chief Data Quality Officer)? Just as executive, operational, financial, risk management,...
You may have recently seen our whitepaper and infographic, Hitting the Data Trifecta, on data quality excellence. It describes how data becomes high quality when it is genuine, accurate, and up-to-date.A...
Last week we released our newest whitepaper – Hitting the Data Trifecta. To accompany it, we’ve created a guide to help you determine what type of contact validation tool you’ll need to help with...
Data quality, or lack thereof, impacts businesses in many ways. Poor data quality, for example, wastes time, paper, and money. Poor data quality can also mean shipping delays, canceled orders, and...
At the heart of our data validation suite is our company's mission: Deliver the most genuine, authentic and accurate data as possible to our customers. Often we're asked to clarify the differences between...
The importance of data quality to companies cannot be denied; but how many know how to identify high quality data from poor data? Even if companies identify a data integrity issue, do they understand the...
