Geocoding converts street addresses to latitude and longitude coordinates enabling us to map to a physical location. Your car’s Graphical Positioning System (GPS), for example, provides a type of directional geocoding based on an address you input. The geocodes themselves, however, have far reaching implications when providing geographical support to other business applications managing sales territories, logistics planning, event marketing, social networks, activity tracking for police, intelligence and health.
Based on personal experience, it’s not difficult to envision the operational downsides of not being able to pinpoint a required business address:
- Poor Customer Service:
In accurate deliveries; missed maintenance and sales appointments
- Poor planning for Sales & Marketing
Lack of geographical support for scheduling customer visits; diminished accuracy for determining market segmentation.
For a Property & Casualty insurance organization, not being able to pinpoint address locations undermines risk management. For emergency services, it’s a life and death proposition.
But as you know from using your own car’s GPS system, geocoding fails if the address is inaccurate – and it doesn’t take much for geocoding to literally go off the track. Inputting 12 Thompson Street instead of 12 Thompson Lane for example, is more than sufficient for your GPS to unexpectedly direct your vehicle to the other side of town.
This is why address verification and enrichment is a critical step to ensuring the accuracy, consistency and business value of geocoding. Address standardization, parsing, corrected misspellings, enrichment of missing address attributes (such as zip code) – all play a role in supporting the bigger enterprise initiatives including successful delivery of customer experience (or 360), customer loyalty and customer onboarding programs.
But the story doesn’t end with address verification. There’s still how address verification and geocoding become a fundamental data quality component of master data management (MDM). While the term may be on the verge of becoming an official cliché, “Single-View of Customer” (and its subset, single-view-of address), is still the name of the game. A true single view of the master record is achieved through a master data management solution providing a holistic approach to managing all customers, all address – and all product data – across all necessary enterprise systems.
So, Geocoding’s business value must be supported by cleansed addresses, which have to be merged and sourced from all relevant enterprise systems.
Concerning the acquisition of an MDM tool, you might need to locate your global sourcing organization, which in turn, might bolster your geocoding pitch.
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