Advantages of using a Web Service

Using a Web service has two advantages: it may be a less expensive option if you process a relatively low number of records; and it eliminates the effort associated with maintaining and updating – it’s handled by the Web service vendor.

Web services, such as a data quality Web service, allow a company to protect their database behind a data quality firewall. Data coming in via call center or online shopping cart is verified and corrected at point of entry – before it enters your CRM system.

Data quality Web services also protect your data from inadvertent errors made by your own data entry personnel. The ability to check, correct and standardize an address “on the fly,” before it is even stored, will serve to minimize bad contact data including, inaccurate street and email addresses, vulgar names and incorrect phone numbers.

Keeping your data clean, complete and up-to-date will benefit you by helping to:

• Reduce Costs. Using a Web Service to verify information instantly will save you time and money and provide immediate ROI. Your sales team can avoid the cost and effort in calling wrong numbers, and you’ll reduce returned mail and undeliverable shipments and wasted postage, packaging and labor.

• Increase Sales. Undeliverable mail, bounced emails and invalid phone numbers are missed opportunities to reach new customers. Your lead quality will improve by validating contact data in real-time which will help make your sales team happier and all your sales and marketing efforts more effective.

• Better Targeting. You can parse and genderize clean contact data, breaking down the contact’s name into prefix, first, middle, last, suffix and then assigning a gender which is useful for segmentation and target marketing. Additional types of data, like demographic and geographic information, can be appended to the contact name, address and telephone number as it is captured and warehoused in the database so that sales and marketing have a wealth of actionable information at their fingertips.

Next Step: Selecting the Right Approach to Data Quality
Learn more about Data Quality Web Services.