Navigating the complexities of managing global address data

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) delivers mail to almost 167 million addresses in the United States, and anyone who has tried to order something online has likely had the experience of not getting a package delivered on time (or at all) because the address was entered incorrectly or in a weird format, causing shipping delays.

The USPS has a standard format it accepts, but it’s not standard around the world. Internationally there are over 200 different address formats used and more than 20 language scripts used to write those addresses. 

Given the complexity of considering all of these different global formats, using a verification service like Melissa’s Global Address service can help ensure that all addresses are properly formatted based on where they need to go, which improves deliverability.

John DeMatteo, solutions engineer I at Melissa, explained in a recent SD Times microwebinar that “fewer errors and returns equals more time to be working on other things, as well as less money spent on returned packages,” he said. 

Melissa’s Global Address service takes in addresses and returns them as validated, enriched, and standardized addresses for more than 250 countries and territories. According to DeMatteo, validated means an address was confirmed through official sources as being accurate and deliverable; enriched means the address was appended with additional data not present in the original request; and standardized means an address is output in the preferred format.

During the microwebinar, DeMatteo gave a demo of Melissa’s Global Address service with the following input address:

FF: 10 Dziadoszaska, Pozna, 61-248, PL

Global Address identifies this as being an address in Poland and reformats it in that country’s preferred address format, and also adds diacritics, which are the symbols that appear over certain letters in the Polish alphabet (ex. ć, ń, ó, ś, ź).

AddressLine1: ul. Dziadoszańska 10
AddressLine2: 61-248 Poznań

The addresses can also be transliterated to Native, Latin, or the Input script. According to DeMatteo, the difference between transliteration and translation is that transliteration converts character by character whereas translation converts whole words.  

To show transliteration in action, another example he shared during the microwebinar is an input written in Kanji — a set of characters used in Japanese writing — that was requested to be output into Latin script. “This is a lot more readable for me if I’m a data steward or someone working with the data,” he said. 

When it comes to making the most out of Global Address, like with any data verification process, “the better the data we have for the input, the better data we have for the output,” DeMatteo said. Therefore, there are a couple of best practices that he recommends following when working with Global Address.

While Global Address is good at detecting the country from the input, he says that when possible, the country code and name should be included with every record. He also recommends sending in multiple addresses at once for batch processing, which can improve speed and efficiency. And finally, customers should avoid including extraneous information not related to the address. 

Global Address can be used on its own, or better yet, in combination with Melissa’s other verification services including Global Name, Global Email, and Global Phone. 

“The Global Suite works together to provide a comprehensive Validation, Enrichment, and Standardization solution for the big four data types,” he said. “Used together, customers can ensure their data is of the highest quality possible.”

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