Address management solutions allow you to gain the maximum benefit from your key asset – your customer and prospect database.

Customer addresses are an important element in customer understanding. They are the basis of local neighbourhood segmentation, as well as the key link to the vast amount of intelligence captured at personal, household, or neighbourhood levels.

Before the advent of micromarketing applications and the general awareness towards address data quality, many organisations have traditionally stored their customer addresses in unstructured, free-text format that is not conducive to systematic analysis.

Experian Business Strategies has developed a software application, Smart-Address, for cleansing and coding of unstructured, free-text customer addresses. Smart-Address takes free-format address data as input, and produces formatted addresses broken down into designated address fields. It helps users convert unstructured address data into standardized format, to facilitate subsequent customer understanding and local area planning applications.

Smart-Address derives its capability from a comprehensive, continuously updated address reference database compiled from multiple sources including the Lands Department, Hongkong Post, Rating and Valuation Department, the Housing Authority, and other public and private sector agencies. This is coupled with intelligent logic to handle abbreviations, mis-spellings, variations, and a mixture of English and Chinese scripts. Each processed address will be assigned a score indicating the level of confidence, for quality control purpose.

Smart-Address can validate and improve the quality of your customer address files. Depending on your licensing options, Smart-Address can be customised to append specific information to enrich your customer address data:

• Mosaic segmentation data
• Geocodes (X-Y co-ordinates)
• Census street block codes
• Hongkong Post’s Postman Beat Codes
• Building attributes (usage, age, etc)

Smart address is a proven solution to address data management. It is currently being deployed on a number of client sites, including banks, telcos, blue-chip companies and government departments.

To find out more about how Experian’s Address Management solutions can help you call +852 2839 5388 or email to info@hk.experian.com