A Cost Effective Approach to Verify and Cleanse your Address Data

Health Insurance Companies are using Profisee Master Data Maestro’s Address Verification Strategy capability to identify and improve their address data quality. Maestro’s address verification can provide the following important steps:

  • Validation: Is the address valid and does it actually exist?
  • Completion: What data is missing? Complete the address
  • Standardization: Uniform abbreviation and spelling so that all of the addresses are in a consistent format.
  • Geocoding: Where is the address? Provides exact location latitude/longitude coordinates.

This solution enables the creation of an address verification strategy and then to be able to execute it. The initial interface to Bing Maps provides standardized addresses and a basis for much better results in any subsequent matching strategy. Of real importance is that this verification can be done by Data Stewards, without the need for any coding or scripting expertise, reducing the reliance on IT/technical experts for tweaks, adjustments or additional strategy creation.Setting up a strategy to validate the address of a location is one of the simplest processes thanks to the interface of Master Data Maestro (Profisee).During a recent implementation we uncovered a couple of issues that we thought were worth sharing to help accelerate your deployment. Specifically:

  • The first time that the strategy ran it only achieved a 10% validation out of 540,000 records. This ‘poor’ rate of return was due to the detection of a threat at the firewall on the network and the process was aborted. Given this fact, it was necessary to change the firewall configuration to allow this traffic to/from Bing services. After these changes were implemented the process was executed for a second time and the validation succeeded, processing 100% of the records.
  • After a few rounds of tweaking the strategy we were able to validate all the addresses. The data stewards were able to see that only 30% of the addresses were accurate. Around 67% of them were cleansed and/or enriched through the Maestro Address service. Given these results, 3% of the addresses had to be analyzed by the Data Stewards and manually corrected. The Data Stewards were shocked to see such poor data quality in the addresses coming out of their source systems.

Having successfully addressed these issues, the benefits of implementing the Maestro Address Verification strategies are obvious. Namely:

  • Reduce the quantity of returned invoices or marketing mailing materials due to incorrect addresses.
  • Better targeting of marketing material by population segment.
  • Track and define a member’s Golden Record using address as a key attribute.
  • Identify the quantity of clients by state, city or county and use this information to create a sales strategy.
  • Analyze, understand and acknowledge the root causes of the bad data to enable Data Stewards to prevent it directly from the source via business rules and data governance.

The Maestro Address verification tool was able to interface directly to the Bing service to automatically validate and cleanse a significant portion of the organization’s address data. In fact, the cost savings resulting from this ability may potentially offset the entire cost of the Maestro software license investment. You should consider this solution for your organization.