What Is Address Cleansing?
It’s essential to make sure address information is correct, particularly for companies and businesses that are sending important mail or packages through the mail. Just like phone numbers and email addresses are crucial to get right in order to receive crucial information and capitalize on opportunities, actual addresses are just as important.
Many businesses will outsource business check services to an outside firm or organization, and often these outsourced companies will provide address cleansing services as well as a safeguard for your mailing.
In this blog, we’re going to define what address cleansing is, why it’s so valuable for businesses in the world today and in the past, and what goes into the address cleansing process. It can save your company several headaches as you scramble to track important information or packages in the mail.
What Is It?
Address cleansing and verification are pretty self-explanatory. It’s the process of checking and confirming the correct address on a piece of mail or a particular package. If the address is wrong or contains a false zip code, house number, or other mistake, packages can quickly go missing, disrupting your business operations and making you play catchup to track them down.
This can be done using a few different methods. One method is the process of using CASS-certified software to rummage through a USPS database to confirm or correct an address. CASS stands for Coding Accuracy Support System.
In this process, the program will compare shipping addresses to a USPS database to comb for errors, typos, or inconsistencies in spelling, state abbreviations, zip codes, and more. In other words, it’s basically Spell Check for addresses based on a massive database.
The program can make correction suggestions or provide alternatives based on what you might have meant to put down. This can help you avoid undeliverable mail or mail delivered to the wrong place.
How Does It Work?
When you filter addresses through an address cleansing software, it really is quite simple. Addresses that are correct will be verified and left alone. Often, if there is a small mistake, the software can tell what verified address you meant to put and correct it easily.
However, for bigger issues, like if the address doesn’t come up in the USPS database, it can be set in a queue tab for manual review. For these unverified addresses, you can opt to send as is, correct and send, or halt the mailing process altogether until you can identify and resolve the issue.
Benefits of Address Cleansing
There are many obvious benefits of an address cleansing service, particularly if you’re sending highly sensitive data or important documents through the mail. These benefits include:
- Reduced returned mail or undeliverable packages
- Stronger communication with recipients
- Lower mailing costs
- Faster delivery time
- Less time/effort spent on updating data
It simply makes your life easier by preventing problems that you’d have to spend time fixing later down the road.
Conclusion
Simply put, it’s about maintaining a clean and verified address to eliminate potential mailing issues for documents, packages, and more. The software can act as a double-checker to ensure your mailing information is correct and going to the right place.
Many outsourced check printing and mailing companies will provide this service for your business as well, eliminating the need to keep an active eye on it yourself.
