subject: Courier Software: Address Verification/validation [print this page] If you've spent any time researching how to choose a courier company, you've likely been told again and again just how important the software a company uses is. The right software can save your couriers time on deliveries, can save you money, and can improve your overall experience with the firm. However, just because you know that the courier dispatch software is important doesn't mean that you necessarily know what features you should be looking for in your prospective courier's software. One feature that you want your courier's software to have is called address verification, or address validation. The two terms mean the same thing.
This is a feature which is designed to reduce the number of times that packages are shipped out with an incorrect address on their label or in the paperwork for the shipment. An incorrect shipping address is something that a courier company tries to avoid at all costs, because it is something which always costs the courier company money. Usually it results in a mistake, and the package either has to then be retrieved, delivered back to the customer, or worst case scenario, is lost, and an insurance claim has to be put in. This is either going to result in the client having to put in that insurance claim, or having to pay a fee (in the case of most couriers) for providing erroneous shipping information. The reason that you want a courier to have address verification is because it can help you avoid making these kinds of mistakes.
What address verification does is actually fairly simplistic, but it is still a very useful feature. When you enter an address into the software that you use to interact with your courier company, the address verification feature can check that address against a list of valid US addresses. It will then flag it if the address you have entered is not valid.
The reason this is so helpful is because most of the time when an address is entered incorrectly, it does end up being a non-valid address. This happens very easily when either someone at your company, or at the courier's, makes a typo, or hears part of an address wrong when taking it down from the customer. If the software catches this error before any type of delivery is attempted, it is going to save everyone money and time. It will also keep your clients happier, as there is less chance of their package being delayed.
