Like many organizations, Strathmore is looking to clean up our database. We are currently wrapping up a long-overdue Clean Sweep, and are now looking to refine our process for standardizing how data comes in.
I recently did an analysis on account creation and found that ~70% of all historic accounts in our database have been generated through TNEW; averaging around 65 new accounts every single day. This isn't necessarily surprising, but it is significant when we realize that we don't have much control over how these new accounts are formatted. We see that patrons are inputting records in all uppercase/lowercase, adding extra spaces and characters, etc.
In an effort to alleviate the burden on staff to review hundreds of new accounts every week, I was investigating the implementation of Experian's Address Verification Tool. I met with one of their representatives and feel that it could be a great option for aligning new data with the USPS standards.
I would LOVE to hear from fellow community members who may have already integrated AVS into their TNEW site--What has YOUR experience been (integrations and day-to-day)? Anything we should be concerned about?
Details of our environment:
Any insight you can provide would be SO appreciated!
We have the address verification through Experian. If you enter your address wrong on tnew at account creation it prompts you with an option to use the corrected address or to use the one you typed in. We also have the plugin for Tessitura that is used by our boxoffice.
Still, we do have one person who regularly goes through all our new accounts to check them for errors. One of those checks is to validate the address with RA. Some in the boxoffice dont use it as regularly as they should.
The TNEW side is fairly maintenance free. Our Tessitura is self hosted, so on our tessitura server we have to apply updates to the Experian service every 3 months or so, otherwise it will stop working, but this only affects tessitura itself and not tnew.
We only really had one issue but its not really Experians fault. Recently we enabled address verification on tnew credit card transactions with our payment processor. Some customers since have not been able to place orders online. Even with the addresses being verified with Experian, it seems some banks use different formatting on how they handle PO boxes and APT #s. We have had customers verify that the address is correctly formatted according to whats on their mailed bank statements and the problem still persists. Our payment processor said its not an uncommon issue and its down to how the banks store the addresses internally and its not a fault of Experian. It does help clean our addresses clean and a fair number of typos are corrected because of it.
Viktor, Some follow up clearification questions:
1) You are self hosted correct?
2) Are you using TNEW and Experian AVS?
Our tessitura is self-hosted.. We use experian (QASONDEMAND) with tnew for address verification.
We also have a plugin (Quick Address Pro) that plugs into Tessitura. It shows up as an "RA" button in Tessitura when working with addresses on the Postal Addresses screen.