From all the CDM capabilities, address verification is the easiest one to explain and use. It all comes down to 2 key functions that allow users to cleanse addresses for all parties in Sales Cloud & Engagement Cloud:
- Address verification checks addresses against a list of verified addresses provided by our partner GBG Locate. More details can be found in a previous post on Oracle Data Cloud for Sales,
- Standardizing addresses is all about reformatting addresses to one single unified format. Imagine how many different ways there are to write ‘Boulevard’. No matter how it is written, address verification will always reformat the addresses to use ‘BLVD’ instead.
Let me show you what that looks like for all persona involved.
Address Verification for Individual Contributors
Individuals can verify addresses each time they create new ones or updated existing ones in the system. Notice the ‘Verify Address’ button in the background on the image below. The verified and standardized address will be returned in real time and can be accepted to overwrite the manually entered address.
But how clean will addresses be if you could only count on the good-will of end users to use this functionality.
Address Verification for Data Stewards
To be less dependent on the participation of every user in the process to keep address information verified and standardized, data stewards can perform the same actions. Not in real time record per record like for individual contributors, but in the background and for multiple addresses simultaneously.
Notice how the screen below allows the data steward to schedule a recurring process to clean address information for addresses that meet the specified search criteria. These processes can be ran in ‘Simulated’ mode to review the results before submitting them, or can be ran in ‘Automated’ mode where the tested process runs in the background and only exceptions need to be reviewed by a Data Steward.
Geocoding
And since you now have cleansed addresses, why not enrich the addresses by adding longitude and latitude coordinates for each address. Just schedule a background process to have these added automatically. This will allow you to pinpoint accounts or contacts, or even leads and opportunities related to each of the accounts and contact using the ‘View in Map’ functionality on the native mobile phone app.
