Addresses are far more than just enabling mechanisms for delivering postal and courier services. Addresses are also used for a wide range of other public and private sector applications, such as risk modeling, field service delivery, infrastructure planning, provision of utilities, emergency dispatch, household surveys, summons serving, and land management. Addresses are critical because they provide a reference context for such disparate information as tax records, bank accounts, mortgages and voting results, and for obtaining employment, conducting household surveys, and visiting friends.

What Is An Address?

An address (in this context) is a referencing system for identifying, locating and cross-referencing physical objects in the real world. Many different types of spatial referencing are in the form of an address:

Financial Benefits of Address Management for Insurance Companies:

• Mitigate Risk based on a full disclosure and understanding of risk elements associated with a property. Insurance companies can more effectively and with greater precision analyze the exposure of their portfolio.
• Reduce cost of claims by spreading risk to reduce accumulation. Knowing the potential loss in a given area allows the insurer to act in a way that would mitigate loss.
• Fraud detection improvement by authenticating the true existence of an address. Cross-validation and authentication of an address add confidence in its physical world existence for employment and residence verification.
• Increase business intelligence and ROI using map-based visualization. Map visualization and analysis give the insight to define with ‘scalpel-like’ precision, at the property level, where businesses should grow while also avoiding businesses that do not fit the target market.

• Street Addresses are typically called Situs or Civic Addresses and contain the most comprehensive reference to street address locations as created and managed by local authorities.
• Landmark Addresses are used traditionally by people to describe some significant landmark location, such as the White House or the Statue of Liberty.
• Postal Addresses are Street Addresses plus a Zip or Postal code. Although postal addresses are often otherwise very similar to their Civic Address equivalent, there can be significant differences, particularly in terms of city name. Postal authorities manage these addresses, receiving them from local authorities and changing them according to specific mailing business rules and regulations.

In everyday business practice, the street address is the most common location reference, and it is used as a key linking mechanism between disparate pieces of information managed by the business. See Figure 1. Addresses are widely used across different industries and in everyday life both as descriptors and as a referencing system. For example:

• Retailers and service providers link customer identification information to address data in order to manage customer databases, predict customer buying behavior, and track services provided to customers.
• Utilities track the locations of pipelines and power lines and use addresses to cross-reference customers, prospects, properties and buildings with infrastructure; to assess risk linked to proximity; and to manage notifications to nearby residents and businesses.
• Emergency services use addresses to identify incident locations, to dispatch the appropriate responders, and to manage response preparedness. Details about the location of the incident are important.
• Marketing professionals are interested in details about the activities that happen at particular addresses (e.g. is it a commercial, industrial or residential establishment?).
• Postal authorities add a delivery index to the address in order to facilitate the sorting and delivering of mail. This index is commonly known as the Zip Code (in the United States) or the Postal Code (in Canada).
• Assessment authorities manage property information and generate Automated Valuation Model (AVM) assessments using an address as a reference.

All these businesses use addresses as mission-critical information to manage their interests. At the same time, it is important to understand the addressing lifecycle to clarify who is the authority responsible for creation of addresses and from where addresses are coming.

Where does an Address originate?

Addresses are created by the address custodians – local authorities – based on rules and standards specified in applicable legislation and regulations. When addresses are created by local authorities, the address list subsequently becomes available for different state or federal agencies and for business providers. From this point forward, the addresses begin to be used for many different business purposes. Through this process, they often become distorted or changed to suit specific operational requirements.

Customer Service Benefits of Address Management for Telecommunications Companies:

• Increasing customer service levels and improving customer experience.
• Reducing pricing errors, order entry time and rework.
• Resolving issues that delay delivery and servicing interval problems.
• Increasing service quality by providing the accuracy and speed for customer service representatives (CSR’s) to respond to new service requests by immediately being able to confirm coverage areas and service levels while customers are on the phone.
• Increasing first call resolution (FCR) and conversion rates (eliminate bounces and call-backs) for new customer inbound phone or email inquiries.
• Improving CSR productivity and efficiency (more revenue per headcount, lower costs per average revenue per user (ARPU) measures via enhanced information immediately available at point of contact.
• Increasing upsell and cross-sell conversion rates from offer development and target prospect list generation.

The address lifecycle illustrated in Figure 2 outlines a layer of hidden issues. Due to political, geographical, cultural and other factors, addresses differ substantially from place to place even though they serve the same basic purposes. Because addresses are created by different local authorities, they represent a variety of different reference systems developed and maintained historically. In the absence of a national standard, these authorities evolved their own independent address creation rules and practices. All of these consequent variations make address management a challenge, which has implications within an organization for the business processes dependent on addresses.

The Location Intelligence Connection

An address has typically been viewed and portrayed in business in relatively simplistic terms as a place where mail is delivered or where services are performed. In fact, however, addresses can be interpreted and managed in a far more sophisticated way that yields valuable location intelligence – intelligence that can drive more effective planning, marketing, service dispatch, customer support, and myriad other business benefits. To do this effectively requires insight into the many attributes of a location – factors such as use, occupancy, ownership and accessibility – and how these attributes can be related to each other and represented geographically. The following business problems and processes are approached with addresses:

Insurance companies require:

• Automated risk adjudication to produce very granular, location-specific risk scores, often down to the individual property level. This, in turn, requires the rapid processing of immense amounts of very granular, location-specific, accurate risk data correctly matched against address data.
• Validation and authentication of applicant addresses, to ensure that the correct assets are being covered and to help reduce fraud.
• Tools to more precisely identify areas of high risk in order to make more informed and cost-effective insurance decisions and reduce unnecessary rejections due to over-generalization of risk influences.

Telecommunication Industry Companies are looking for:

• Integration of data among different corporate divisions (engineering, sales, marketing, invoicing and customer service) to facilitate rapid response to questions regarding serviceability, pricing, installation scheduling, service outages and customer support. Since the address is often the only common field across these databases, correct address-to-address linkages are critical.
• Identification of ‘non-serviced, within territory addresses’ that are therefore high-value prospects (easy to service, low incremental servicing cost, high profitability).
• Address validation, authentication and precise location to improve the integrity of service locations and billing addresses.
• The identification and attribution of multi-unit buildings (residential, commercial, government and mixed use), as these addresses represent high revenue potential but are typically poorly handled within corporate databases.
• Tools to make more informed and cost-effective decisions regarding marketing strategies and engineering plans, such as infrastructure rollout priorities and targeted marketing campaigns.

Address Silos

For most organizations, address information has historically been used for such diverse purposes as billing, delivering products, installing services, or calculating property taxation. Even at this level, managing address information has been a challenge because the data are often collected by separate lines of business or business functions, each of which has different business practices, quality standards and operational biases. As a result, address information resides in data “silos” and cannot easily be integrated and cross-referenced for accuracy, duplication or cross-selling. Data cleansing and integration can involve a major investment of time and resources.

More problems emerge when organizations try to leverage address information for more sophisticated purposes. Largely, this is because a street address on its own is often insufficient to drive other business processes effectively. It does not, for example, convey property land use, zoning, or co-located infrastructure – potentially essential parameters to consider when determining serviceability for customers and prospects.

Another challenge is the sheer complexity of these parameters. They are neither mutually exclusive, nor easily aligned into relationships for which business rules can be readily written. For example, one street address can have multiple locations, and each location can have many different attributes. The result is a complex web of data and data relationships that are difficult to decipher, much less act upon.

Without a comprehensive view and understanding of all address attributes, businesses cannot properly target their marketing, accurately price and bill for products and services, efficiently dispatch onsite services, or properly plan for future services. Most corporate address data stores are inadequate for making these decisions, resulting in service failures, wasted resources, missed business opportunities and costly mistakes.

Address Standards

An essential part of the Address Management system is the implementation of an addressing standard. In the U.S., a national addressing standard has been recently developed as an initiative of URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association), with the support of NENA (National Emergency Number Association) and the U.S. Census Bureau. This standard is expected to be recognized officially by the Federal Geographic Data Committee. The existence of a standard, however, does not imply that it has or will be universally implemented.

DMTI Spatial has developed for Canadian addresses a similar addressing standard, which the company is putting forward as a suggestion for a Canadian national addressing standard.

Following is a list of addressing standards and their implication for infrastructure services provided by different businesses:

• Address data must reflect the real world street addresses. The principal addresses to be tracked are street addresses, not postal addresses, which are purposely built to facilitate the efficient delivery of mail.  The standard of “real world street address” provides a rigorous foundation upon which to base effective operations and for business planning to establish metrics to monitor market penetration, market potential and size, and cost of delivery/service.
• Address data must be up-to-date and unambiguous in order to avoid uncertainty and errors. Although many organizations are advised of address approvals and major nomenclature changes as they occur, rarely are private companies updated each time individual elements within the address change.
• Address data must have data matching continuity: Addresses used within different business units tend to acquire operational biases based upon the specific nature of the way the addresses are used. The attributes that have the greatest impact on that specific business unit receive the greatest attention and are created and maintained to a higher standard than attributes that are simply “nice to have,” which are largely ignored. Data definitions change subtly to respond to specific operational needs. Over time, data purporting to represent the same customers and assets in different departments drift apart. This causes workflow and management issues within the organization as addresses potentially no longer recognized as the “same” are double counted or mismatched. Subsequently, business records do not carry the continuity required for data matching, or for the data mining and deeper customer analysis required in today’s market to stay competitive.
• A defined standard should incorporate data quality testing techniques.
• Having an address federation capability enables a high level of integration among the different silos of an organization.
• For example, often the customer database is managed independently from the billing database, a disparity that can present problems for delivery of emergency services in the case of, for example, a natural gas company. Another problem occurs when customers in the customer service database do not exist in the billing system, which results in revenue loss for services that are provided but not paid for. Address standardization resolves the disparity between these databases.