Enhancing Address Data Quality with Tamr: A Comprehensive Solution

Summary

• Address data quality is crucial for industries like logistics, transportation, and e-commerce.
• Tamr's AI-first approach streamlines address data management processes.
• Tamr automates geocoding, improves accuracy, and enhances efficiency.
• Businesses using Tamr experience faster data processing and higher accuracy rates.
• Tamr's geospatial capabilities and flexible features make it a comprehensive solution for address data management.

Addresses are a critical piece of customer data. And for some industries, such as logistics, e-commerce, and transportation, they're essential to ensure efficient route planning and timely deliveries. However, keeping address data accurate and up-to-date is an ongoing challenge. Industry experts say that "up to 20 percent of a company’s contacts contain bad data, resulting in returned mail, address correction fees, bounced emails, and wasted sales and marketing efforts." And to make matters worse, many existing address geocoding processes are manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors.

To overcome these challenges with address data, businesses are leveraging Tamr’s advanced data mastering capabilities. Tamr's AI-first approach to mastering data has proven to be a game-changer when it comes to improving address data, enabling companies to enhance data quality, streamline processes, and improve efficiency. This blog post explores how Tamr transforms address data management, highlighting its key features, benefits, and real-world applications.

The Challenges with Address Data Quality

Having accurate, up-to-date address data is critical. Address cleansing solutions, as originally deployed, were not designed to cope with the sheer variety of data that the modern enterprise data landscape now throws at them. In addition, customers with a global reach often employ multiple address cleansing solutions to take advantage of the varying experience and regional coverage of each solution, or differences in output and cost. However, this approach leads to the business managing multiple pipelines separately. These challenges lead to a number of issues including: 

• Data silos: Disparate data sources make it difficult to maintain consistent and accurate geocoding. It's common practice for companies to store address data across multiple systems and formats, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies.
• Inconsistent data entry: A lack of data entry standards leads users to enter address information inconsistently. For example, while some users may spell out "Street," others may use the abbreviation "St" or "St." Without documented data entry standards, these variances, while all technically correct, will cause issues when integrating address data across systems.
• Manual processes: Time-consuming steps hinder the timely delivery of geocoded shipment data, while attempts to apply governance through manual standardization, matching, and verification processes slow down operations and introduce the risk of human error.
• Expertise requirement: In many cases, companies require specialized skills to obtain accurate geocoding results. The complexity of geocoding processes necessitates expert intervention, making it challenging to scale operations.

Further, many companies' existing address geocoding processes involve multiple steps, including standardization, exact matching, fuzzy matching, and address interpolation. These cumbersome processes are not only time-consuming, but are also costly and require specialist knowledge.

How Tamr Improves the Quality of Address Data

Tamr provides companies with a scalable and automated workflow for improving address data quality and geocoding shipment addresses. The key features of Tamr's solution include:

• End-to-end workflow automation: Tamr automates the entire geocoding process, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. Tamr's solution integrates seamlessly with existing systems, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to operations.
• High accuracy: Tamr enables organizations to achieve over 90% accuracy in geocoding with a 10-meter margin of error. Tamr’s advanced algorithms and machine learning models continuously learn and improve, providing reliable and precise geocoding results.
• Speed to value: With Tamr, businesses can significantly reduce the time required to process shipment data. Using Tamr's efficient data processing capabilities, companies can handle large volumes of address data quickly and accurately.

Improving Address Data Quality: Implementation and Results

Businesses that implement Tamr to improve address data quality experience significant improvements, including:

• Data processing efficiency: Tamr processes large volumes of records in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods. For example, Tamr can process millions of customer shipment profilesin just a few hours, compared to the any hours or days needed by other solutions.
• Accuracy improvement: A high percentage of shipments are accurately geocoded, with Tamr achieving a 90% alignment with existing benchmarks. The solution effectively reduces errors and inconsistencies in address data.
• User enablement: Teams require minimal training to build and manage the mastering workflow. Tamr’s user-friendly platform ensures that employees can quickly become proficient in using the solution, leading to faster adoption and better outcomes.

Tamr's Geospatial Capabilities

Tamr’s geospatial capabilities play a crucial role in enhancing the accuracy and reliability of address data. Key features include:

• Geocode clustering groups various formats of shipment addresses into a single clean address, helping to manage and standardize addresses and ensure consistency across different datasets.
• Visual verification displays geocoded addresses on a map for easy verification. Users can visually confirm the accuracy of geocoded addresses by comparing them to street information displayed on the map.
• Handling complex addresses by accurately geocoding addresses for large complexes, such as hospitals and malls, by considering multiple geocodes for different buildings. Tamr’s solution accounts for the unique challenges posed by complex address structures.

Expanding Tamr’s Address Mastering Capabilities

Tamr’s AI-native data mastering solution is flexible and extensible, making it easy to implement additional features and enhancements such as:

• Data enrichment: Tamr’s native data enrichment services can geocode unmatched records using additional internal and external data sources, improving the completeness and accuracy of address data.
• Component-based addressing: The solution can split addresses into components (e.g., block number, street, postal code) to enhance geocoding precision. This allows for more granular control and better management of address data.
• Alternative geocoding methods: Tamr supports different methods (e.g., distance-based evaluations) for calculating geocodes, which is particularly useful for larger buildings and complex address structures. This flexibility ensures that the geocoding process can adapt to various requirements and scenarios.

Using Tamr, businesses can significantly improve the quality, completeness, and accuracy of their address data, enabling efficient route planning and timely deliveries. By automating manual processes and ensuring high accuracy, Tamr helps companies achieve operational excellence and deliver superior customer experiences, demonstrating the potential of Tamr's AI-native data mastering technology to transform address data management for businesses worldwide.

To see Tamr in action, please request a demo.