SmartyStreets Company Blog

The next few weeks (and few months for that matter) are going to be very big for Qualified Address. We have a number of significant improvements and changes in the pipeline that we know you’ll love.

In preparation for these changes we have started to somewhat consolidate our product offerings. After careful analysis and consideration of our target market, of customer behavior, and of our interactions with several of our current customers, we have decided to move away from offering NCOA.

Yes, you read that right. We’re going to discontinue offering our NCOA product. First, let me reassure you that this is not a move that we have taken lightly, especially because we have spent several years in development on this product. There were a number of significant factors that contributed to our decision. One of the biggest things that we found was that NCOA is a relatively confusing product; the market perception of what NCOA can do for your address list is somewhat misleading to customers.

The confusion surrounds the need to definitively and precisely identify the individual, family, or company that resides at a particular address. The problem is that NCOA doesn’t actually do this. NCOA does exactly one thing: it gives the new address for a person/family/company, provided that you have an old address. Many take this to mean that you can identify where someone lives. But again, you can’t. To further compound the problem, the NCOA database only contains about four years of history, which means that NCOA will return the same result for someone that moved 4.5 years ago as someone that has never moved: “No Match”. Does this mean John Smith lives at the address provided? Not necessarily.

Furthermore, as part of the NCOA license agreement, the USPS requires us to disclose information to them for all those customers who have purchased NCOA processing. One of the final nails in the NCOA coffin was that we found we were spending an abundant amount of time on the product, both because of the complexity and overhead it imposed for USPS-related reporting, and because of oversight and customer re-education (as a result of the aforementioned misconceptions). The bottom line was clear: NCOA was quickly becoming a big time vacuum for us, and was preventing us from delivering real business value to our customers.

That’s not to say that NCOA doesn’t deliver any business value. It does. It’s just not the expected value that customers want it to deliver, and we found that it was preventing us from moving forward.

Our ultimate goal is to become a single-product company. Crazy, right? While this may sound silly at first, there is actually a good deal of wisdom that can be found herein. With just one single address verification product, you—the customer—can more easily focus on what that one product can do for you and how much of it you want to purchase, rather than trying to understand the difference between the various capabilities of multiple products and their respective pricing schemes. Furthermore, as we introduce new features and capabilities to our “one true product”, you will automatically receive those capabilities at no extra charge. For example, if we decide in the near future to re-introduce NCOA, all customers would receive NCOA at no extra charge. How cool is that?

The next few months are going to be ones of dramatic improvement for the company as we focus our efforts and energies on the great experience we want everyone to have on our website. What do you think? Is this a terrible idea? Should those pushing these changes forward be fired or promoted?

By using our LiveAddress validation tool, you can instantly validate any US address. You may need to do address verification while you are taking an order over the phone—this is just the tool. You can also  install the program onto your own website, allowing customers to verify their own addresses before check-out.

LiveAddress Verification can save you time, money, and energy, all while giving your business the following benefits:

• Fewer calls from customers wondering where their order is.
• Fewer return shipments
• Fewer lost shipments.
• Happier customers! (and isn’t that the most important thing?)

Due to many requests by our customers, we at Qualified Address have decided to create a series of short video tutorials, demonstrating the different facets of our product line. These tutorials will feature the benefits of address scrubbing and address verification, so that you, the customer, can be better informed, and more able to understand each process.

• Less return mail with out-of-date addresses

• Results returned faster, cheaper, and easier than any other NCOA provider
• Less time spent updating return mail to update addresses
• Savings on postage cost from returned mail
• Reduction in the number of pages clients print for mailing– not only does this save the organization money it also helps its green status
• Greater faith in the accuracy of your data– this impacts your ability to properly segment your markets, and thereby better communicate with your various customers
• Messages delivered to customers sooner because the correct address is used the first time, no need to resend
• Clean database– reducing the time clients take to manage records which yield no return
• Greater discounts from USPS (these are offered to bulk mailers who perform NCOA on their data)
• Standardized addresses that fit all USPS standards, as well as provide zip +4 information
• Provided Return Codes, which indicate that a match was obtained. These are accompanied by either a new address or undeliverable status, and help clients better analyze their data.
• To underscore the importance of NCOA, USPS estimates over 40 million Americans change their address annually. The larger the constituent list, the higher potential to lose contact with people as their addresses change.

a) open Microsoft Word and click on the “mailings” tab (located in the menu at the top of the document).  

b) click on “Labels,” and the “Envelope and Labels” page should pop up, looking like this:

 

c) Choose “Options” from the “Envelopes and Labels” window. This will open the “Label Options” window, shown in the following diagram:

d) Click the dropdown under “Label vendors” and select the brand of your label. Then select the correct product number, and click “New Document.”

e) Under the “Mailings” tab, click on “Select Recipients,” and choose “Use Existing List.”  
 
 

 
f) Under the “Mailings” tab, click on the “Insert Merge Field” dropdown. This will list a number of fields for you to choose from. The fields we need for a barcode are: QA_Firmname, QA_DeliveryLine1, QA_City, QA_State, QA_FullZIPCode, and QA_Barcode. (Essentially what we are doing in this step is creating a template with a barcode for the delivery addresses.)




After selecting the fields, your document should look like this:
 
g) Now, you need to change the font of the QA_Barcode field so it will show up as a barcode. To do this, highlight the field “QA_Barcode.” Open the “Home” tab, and click in the font box on the toolbar. Scroll through the dropdown list until you find the USPS Bar Code font, and then click on it.

4. Preview barcodes. Once you have the codes downloaded to Microsoft Word, preview the final document to make sure everything is set up correctly. To do this, follow these directions:

a) Click the “Mailings” tab on the toolbar. Click “Preview Results” (near the right side of the toolbar).

b) A document like the following should appear, allowing you to view all scrubbed addresses along with their individual barcodes.

5. Prepare the barcodes. When you have entered all of your scrubbed addresses, and are ready for shipping, you will need to print your barcodes. The following steps will teach you how to prepare the envelopes and barcodes for printing:

a) Click “Finish & Merge” located on the toolbar.


b) Three options are given for finishing the merge: “Edit Individual Documents,” “Print Documents,” and “Send Email Messages.” Choosing “Edit Individual Documents” allows you to make individual changes to each envelope. “Print Documents” allows you to print off all envelopes; they will be ready to be mailed, complete with barcode attached. “Send Email Messages” allows you to email the documents in attachment– HTML, or plain text formats.

*Note: When printing labels, place the labels facing down in the machine.*

A recent conversation on LinkedIn brought up some shocking estimates of what one piece of UAA (Undeliverable as Addressed) mail costs an organization. We thought you might be interested in this information.

Factoring in the cost of postage plus paper, labor, carbon footprint, etc., one member noted that the total cost for a business to receive back one piece of “undeliverable as addressed” mail is about $3.00. Another Linkedin member noted that doing some mailings for her company using “address verification services” (like those provided by Qualified Address) brought a 34:1 ROI.

We can’t verify these numbers, but everyone agrees that undeliverable mail is expensive. Certainly, it pays to have a clean, updated mailing list.

The option we recommend is NCOA(National Change of Address), a web-based service provided by Qualified Address. NCOA will ensure that if your customers have moved, you can find their updated address. The service also includes CASS, which will scrub your list and make sure the addresses are formatted correctly so that they are deliverable.

We just wanted to give everyone a heads up that our geo-distributed LiveAddress API is going live on Tuesday morning, November 8th.  We have already been running in fully geo-distributed mode with many of our address verification customers for the last week and they have been quite pleased.  In fact, for all of our customers along the East Coast, the latency will drop due to the fewer number of network hops required.

We still have plans for an additional set of nodes along the West Coast in order to better service our customer base out of California.  We will keep you posted on how that develops.

In the meantime, many of you have been asking for some kind of public “status page” hosted by a third party, which would be unaffected by any potential downtime we might experience.  The provider we are currently testing is called “Site24x7”.  If we decide to utilize another provider, we’ll let you know.

The status page can be found here.

Last Thursday morning, October 14, we experienced a significant address verification outage lasting approximately five hours. The outage was incredibly frustrating for our customers on several levels. The primary service that was affected was our LiveAddress API address verification web service. This post is our attempt to detail exactly what happened and what we plan on doing about it.

What Happened

Our primary billing/accounting server suffered a failure do to the automatic installation of scheduled operating system updates. Specifically, the server automatically installed the updates and rebooted as part of the update process. This process typically takes about two minutes, but this time the server failed to reboot properly. It hung during the shutdown sequence after the updates had been applied.

The main problem with this was related to how we were monitoring the status of the machine. According to the statistics gathered, the machine was online and functioning, and could be pinged, etc. But in reality, the machine was hung in a shutdown sequence. After a few reboots, we managed to get things back into an operational state. Currently things are operating normally.

Lack of Communication

One of the most infuriating aspects of this outage from a customer’s perspective was related to that of communication in both directions. Once we were aware of the outage it wasn’t long before we were fully operational again. Unfortunately, this meant that all of our resources were dedicated to bringing everything back into an operational state rather than communicating to our customers what was happening. That was bad. The other aspect of this that was even more upsetting to customers was their inability to contact us in a time-critical manner. That was even worse. Opening the channels of communication alone could have cut the length of the outage dramatically. We pride ourselves on responding quickly to customer needs and being available to answer their questions. But this experience has clearly demonstrated to us that the way things currently operate in regards to communication is not even close to sufficient. In fact, it’s just plain short-sighted. So we’re making changes. Big ones.

Technical Solutions (The Dirty Details)

The way our LiveAddress API was designed,when a verification request is received, it makes a synchronous call to our billing mechanism to determine if you have an active subscription and if your account has sufficient queries available in order to fulfill the request. The architecture behind the LiveAddress system is a typical “web services architecture.” This type of service is advocated as a “best practice” by the major software vendors, including Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle. Yet, at the same time, it was this architecture that led directly to the outage. Recently there has been significant movement in the programming community related to leveraging better architectures, such as those heavily-utilized by such companies as Amazon, Google, Facebook, eBay, and Twitter. It is by following this new architectural guidance—breaking things apart slightly and moving toward the “AP” side of Eric Brewer’s CAP Theorem, rather than the “CA” side—that we are able to gain tremendous advantages for ourselves and our customers.

Over the weekend and during the early part of this week, we worked on splitting the LiveAddress codebase apart in order to introduce what is known in computing terms as “eventual consistency” into the billing/accounting process associated with each LiveAddress verification query. Specifically, we will now be performing a look-up on a slightly out-of-date version of the subscription data against a local store. This means our accounting system, whose database located on a separate machine, may be a few hundred milliseconds behind—or perhaps even a few hours behind in the case of a significant billing/accounting outage—while the LiveAddress system will be completely unaffected and just reading an “old” copy of the subscription information. In a worst-case scenario you, our customers, may receive more queries for your subscription than originally purchased, all at no extra charge. That’s completely okay, because the LiveAddress system will remain online servicing requests. This will cost us significantly less in terms of customer aggravation and frustration.

This new architecture yields a number of positive consequences. First, each node is now entirely self-contained, and requires no outside information beyond what it has in its local database in order to service each request. Another positive consequence of this new architecture is that we are now able to more fully geo-distribute our system. In fact, we are already moving quickly towards new instances of the software on servers located in Washington DC and Seattle, in addition to extra capacity at our facility in Dallas.

Monitoring Solutions

We are also moving to change how we monitor our system. Instead of basic hardware and software monitoring, we’re moving to have the health of the application monitored in a much more thorough manner. We are also looking at third party providers, who provide out-of-band health/status pages that would remain available and reachable for users in the case of outages on our part.

Communication Solutions

By far, the biggest takeaway in all of this, is related to how we communicate with our customers and how our customers communicate with us. We have determined that you need multiple ways to communicate that work for you.

As a result, we are opening our communication channels more fully. Here’s how you can get in touch with us:

• Email (the preferred method): support@smartystreets.com (I’d love to actually put the email address without splitting it apart and spelling it out in this post, but if I did, we’d be saturated in spam, and it would take us longer to communicate with you). Email is the preferred method of contact, because it gives us a history of our interaction with you and allows us to respond in a consistent manner. Our target response time for email is less than an hour, and we are often able to respond within thirty minutes.
• Twitter. Our username is: qualifiedaddr. I’d love to have it be qualifiedaddress, but it’s one character too long and they impose 15-character length limitation on usernames.  UPDATE: Our twitter username is now smartystreets.
• Phone: We provide telephone support during regular business hours at: (888) 216-8883 x3014.
• Emergency Phone: If at any time LiveAddress appears to be unavailable or not responding, please contact our emergency line: (801) 477-4189. This line is for emergencies, not technical support. This will forward to the personal mobile phone of the person on duty.
• Text Message: (801) 477-4189.  We are using a Google Voice account, which takes the text message and forwards to a distribution email which we are monitoring.
• Snail Mail: Really? You want to send us a letter? If there’s a problem with our system, please DON’T write a letter. Use a faster form of communication. But if you really do want to write us a letter (for whatever reason), you’re welcome to do so. Just make sure it’s for something non-mission critical.

Conclusion

By introducing some technical changes and providing open channels of communication, we hope to never experience down-time to the extent that we experienced on Thursday. We know that there are a lot of people and companies relying on us to keep our systems operational and we are committed to keeping our systems up and running. This is why we have no long-term contracts that keep you from going elsewhere.  We know that if we have the best service at the best price, the customers will come. If you’re ever unsatisfied, we invite you to let us know, but we won’t force you to stay if you’d like to go elsewhere.

At the same time, there are methods of architecting your external service calls such that down-time on the part of the service provider (us or others) does not affect the normal workflow of your application. If you are interested in these methods of external interaction, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help you understand what they are and how they can benefit your application relative to all third-party services, not just ours.

We thank you for your patience with us and we hope to continue having the privilege of earning and keeping your business in the future. Don’t hesitate to let us know about your questions and concerns.  We’ll be here.

– Jonathan Oliver, CTO, Qualified Address

Qualified Address offers two different address verification scrubbing services. The two are similar in that they both return quality data for addresses. The difference between the two is in how much data is returned to the customer. A review of what services each provides is listed below:

Standard Scrubbing

• Standardizes address lists
• Guarantees privacy
• Provides Locatable Address Correction System (LACSLink) processing
• Corrects and appends ZIP Codes
• Corrects and appends ZIP+4 Codes
• Flags duplicate addresses

CASS-Certified Scrubbing
Handles everything listed above, PLUS the following:

• Provides Delivery Point Validation (DPVTM)
• Flags missing apartments & suites
• Flags CMRA (Commercial Mail Receiving Agency) private mailboxes
• Provides CASS Summary Report (Form 3553) – This form is needed for the USPS automation rate discounts.
• Generates POSTNET Delivery Point Barcode
• Supplies Carrier Route (CRRT) information

As with all of the products offered by Qualified Address, both Scrubbing services are SaaS (Software as a Service).