We’ve been busy the last few weeks working on some cool new features for our address verification.

Auto-mapping
The first big feature has been a long time coming: auto-mapping. Auto-mapping is the ability for our system to detect the contents of your file in order to figure out what your columns mean. For example, if your column says “Owner’s Street Address 1″, we’ll be able to look at that, and determine that it’s really the primary street address of your file.

Auto-mapping saves a ton of time. In fact, in most cases you can now upload your file, click “Import List,” and you’re done. There’s no more dealing with the hassle of telling us what each column in your file represents. How simple is that?

Compressed files
Processing really large files has been somewhat of a pain in previous iterations of our list-import process. Prior to last month’s release, there wasn’t even a progress bar. Yuck. But even with a progress bar (which is now visible in modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), it was still painfully slow to upload a file 200 MB or larger.

Now we offer the the ability to upload your compressed file. Simply take your file—be it Excel, CSV, or tab-delimited text—and compress it using your operating system’s “zipping” capability. Then upload that file to our site. We currently accept files up to 512 MB in size (that’s a lot of addresses!) using this process. If you need to process something larger, you can make arrangements with us for an alternate upload method. We’ve also got a release on the horizon that will address really large files in a much better fashion than manual HTTP uploads.

Drag & drop uploads
Finally!

The old school way of clicking on the upload button and navigating to the file in the upload window is…painful. Now, with modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, you can simply drag your file from the desktop to the website, and a file upload drop zone will appear. Drop the file in the drop zone, and the file will begin uploading.

*Internet Explorer users, we’re sorry, but you may have to wait a bit for us to iron out some compatibility issues.*

Conclusion
Each of these changes are small, but collectively they add up to a greatly streamlined user experience. And that’s what we want—a seamless, clean, fast user experience where the sum total = awesome.  Enjoy.

Last week we launched a complete overhaul of our entire list processing system. It’s been a long time coming, and is probably one of the most requested changes from our customers.

The new system we built is magnitudes faster than our previous system (because it scales almost linearly), and is better able to recognize the various kinds of files used by our customers—especially lists in Excel 2007 format and later.

Another huge improvement is our new consolidated dashboard view with all of your list activity. In our previous system, the upload process was distinct and separate from the management and administration of the various lists. Now, everything is combined into a unified view. There’s no more need to switch back and forth between the various screens, because everything is right there.

Lastly, the file upload and import process has been completely re-engineered. In the previous system, the file upload process was about eight steps over eight different screens. The new process is exactly three steps on a single screen—upload your file, map your columns, and import.

We’re super excited about the productivity gains that this release gives our customers. But more importantly, it becomes a platform on which we can more quickly release additional capabilities and features.  We’ve got a lot of great plans for new features, and now we can more forward with them.

As previously mentioned, this release has been a long time coming. And now that it’s here, we’re in a much better position to start focusing on delivering more awesomeness so that our address verification customers be delivering awesome too.

Qualified Address is now SmartyStreets. But, by now, you’ve probably guessed that. With any kind of name change or re-branding there are bound to be questions.

What’s Wrong With The Old Name?
Qualified Address was a pretty good name, and it has served us well for years. But as we have grown and our culture has evolved, we have come to realize that the name Qualified Address no longer adequately conveys who we are or where we are going as a company.

Frankly speaking, Qualified Address was a little too…well…boring. And that’s not who we are. When we come into work everyday, we bring our “A-Game”. When we talk or interact with you, our customers, we want you to feel the excitement about what we do. We don’t mind talking about our flair or the fact that we won’t put cover pages on our TPS reports.  Address verification is what we do.

Why “SmartyStreets”?
First and foremost, we wanted something unique and memorable (not to mention “Google-able”). We wanted something that conveys what we do as a company, while still allowing our personality to show through. SmartyStreets is all of that and then some, all wrapped up in one neat little package.

Here’s the fun part. Now that you’ve seen the name SmartyStreets, we’d like you to try and forget it. Seriously! Just try to not remember the name. That’s how we came to pick SmartyStreets in the first place. No matter how hard we tried, we kept coming back to it because we couldn’t get it out of our heads. SmartyStreets. SmartyStreets. SmartyStreets. See? It’s stuck.

The other reason that we went with SmartyStreets is that it plays well with the concept of “street smarts,” which means having a lot of actual experience. In our case, we have a lot of experience related to streets and addresses. So what better name than something that conveys the level of expertise we have about streets and addresses in general?

New Name, Same Awesome
For us, this name change represents business as usual. And by “business as usual” we mean our continuing to deliver all of the awesome in new, interesting, and fun (un-boring) ways. We hope you enjoy it too. Tell us what you think. We want to hear all of your feedback.

Really.

As part of our initiative to overhaul our product line and to deliver more business value to our customers, we have recently added the ability to append county information to our CASS Certified Scrubbing product.

Customers have been asking about this for quite awhile. Our original plans were to have “add-on” booster/extension packs that you would purchase for a small fee to append county information and other kinds to your file. By consolidating our product line, the way forward is much more clear than extension packs and add-on “boosters”. Instead of making plug-ins and charging extra for each one, we’ll simply include them for free. Gotta love that, right?

All of this is part of our much larger initiative to vastly simplify and enhance the entire user experience that customers have with us. We want to be your address verification company of choice because we “bring it”, always delivering the value you deserve. Also, rocking the establishment gets everyone—especially us—excited about what we’re doing.

The next few weeks (and few months for that matter) are going to be very big for Qualified Address. We have a number of significant improvements and changes in the pipeline that we know you’ll love.

In preparation for these changes we have started to somewhat consolidate our product offerings. After careful analysis and consideration of our target market, of customer behavior, and of our interactions with several of our current customers, we have decided to move away from offering NCOA.

Yes, you read that right. We’re going to discontinue offering our NCOA product. First, let me reassure you that this is not a move that we have taken lightly, especially because we have spent several years in development on this product. There were a number of significant factors that contributed to our decision. One of the biggest things that we found was that NCOA is a relatively confusing product; the market perception of what NCOA can do for your address list is somewhat misleading to customers.

The confusion surrounds the need to definitively and precisely identify the individual, family, or company that resides at a particular address. The problem is that NCOA doesn’t actually do this. NCOA does exactly one thing: it gives the new address for a person/family/company, provided that you have an old address. Many take this to mean that you can identify where someone lives. But again, you can’t. To further compound the problem, the NCOA database only contains about four years of history, which means that NCOA will return the same result for someone that moved 4.5 years ago as someone that has never moved: “No Match”. Does this mean John Smith lives at the address provided? Not necessarily.

Furthermore, as part of the NCOA license agreement, the USPS requires us to disclose information to them for all those customers who have purchased NCOA processing. One of the final nails in the NCOA coffin was that we found we were spending an abundant amount of time on the product, both because of the complexity and overhead it imposed for USPS-related reporting, and because of oversight and customer re-education (as a result of the aforementioned misconceptions). The bottom line was clear: NCOA was quickly becoming a big time vacuum for us, and was preventing us from delivering real business value to our customers.

That’s not to say that NCOA doesn’t deliver any business value. It does. It’s just not the expected value that customers want it to deliver, and we found that it was preventing us from moving forward.

Our ultimate goal is to become a single-product company. Crazy, right? While this may sound silly at first, there is actually a good deal of wisdom that can be found herein. With just one single address verification product, you—the customer—can more easily focus on what that one product can do for you and how much of it you want to purchase, rather than trying to understand the difference between the various capabilities of multiple products and their respective pricing schemes. Furthermore, as we introduce new features and capabilities to our “one true product”, you will automatically receive those capabilities at no extra charge. For example, if we decide in the near future to re-introduce NCOA, all customers would receive NCOA at no extra charge. How cool is that?

The next few months are going to be ones of dramatic improvement for the company as we focus our efforts and energies on the great experience we want everyone to have on our website. What do you think? Is this a terrible idea? Should those pushing these changes forward be fired or promoted?

By using our LiveAddress validation tool, you can instantly validate any US address. You may need to do address verification while you are taking an order over the phone—this is just the tool. You can also  install the program onto your own website, allowing customers to verify their own addresses before check-out.

LiveAddress Verification can save you time, money, and energy, all while giving your business the following benefits:

• Fewer calls from customers wondering where their order is.
• Fewer return shipments
• Fewer lost shipments.
• Happier customers! (and isn’t that the most important thing?)

Due to many requests by our customers, we at Qualified Address have decided to create a series of short video tutorials, demonstrating the different facets of our product line. These tutorials will feature the benefits of address scrubbing and address verification, so that you, the customer, can be better informed, and more able to understand each process.

• Less return mail with out-of-date addresses

• Results returned faster, cheaper, and easier than any other NCOA provider
• Less time spent updating return mail to update addresses
• Savings on postage cost from returned mail
• Reduction in the number of pages clients print for mailing– not only does this save the organization money it also helps its green status
• Greater faith in the accuracy of your data– this impacts your ability to properly segment your markets, and thereby better communicate with your various customers
• Messages delivered to customers sooner because the correct address is used the first time, no need to resend
• Clean database– reducing the time clients take to manage records which yield no return
• Greater discounts from USPS (these are offered to bulk mailers who perform NCOA on their data)
• Standardized addresses that fit all USPS standards, as well as provide zip +4 information
• Provided Return Codes, which indicate that a match was obtained. These are accompanied by either a new address or undeliverable status, and help clients better analyze their data.
• To underscore the importance of NCOA, USPS estimates over 40 million Americans change their address annually. The larger the constituent list, the higher potential to lose contact with people as their addresses change.

a) open Microsoft Word and click on the “mailings” tab (located in the menu at the top of the document).  

b) click on “Labels,” and the “Envelope and Labels” page should pop up, looking like this:

 

c) Choose “Options” from the “Envelopes and Labels” window. This will open the “Label Options” window, shown in the following diagram:

d) Click the dropdown under “Label vendors” and select the brand of your label. Then select the correct product number, and click “New Document.”

e) Under the “Mailings” tab, click on “Select Recipients,” and choose “Use Existing List.”  
 
 

 
f) Under the “Mailings” tab, click on the “Insert Merge Field” dropdown. This will list a number of fields for you to choose from. The fields we need for a barcode are: QA_Firmname, QA_DeliveryLine1, QA_City, QA_State, QA_FullZIPCode, and QA_Barcode. (Essentially what we are doing in this step is creating a template with a barcode for the delivery addresses.)




After selecting the fields, your document should look like this:
 
g) Now, you need to change the font of the QA_Barcode field so it will show up as a barcode. To do this, highlight the field “QA_Barcode.” Open the “Home” tab, and click in the font box on the toolbar. Scroll through the dropdown list until you find the USPS Bar Code font, and then click on it.

4. Preview barcodes. Once you have the codes downloaded to Microsoft Word, preview the final document to make sure everything is set up correctly. To do this, follow these directions:

a) Click the “Mailings” tab on the toolbar. Click “Preview Results” (near the right side of the toolbar).

b) A document like the following should appear, allowing you to view all scrubbed addresses along with their individual barcodes.

5. Prepare the barcodes. When you have entered all of your scrubbed addresses, and are ready for shipping, you will need to print your barcodes. The following steps will teach you how to prepare the envelopes and barcodes for printing:

a) Click “Finish & Merge” located on the toolbar.


b) Three options are given for finishing the merge: “Edit Individual Documents,” “Print Documents,” and “Send Email Messages.” Choosing “Edit Individual Documents” allows you to make individual changes to each envelope. “Print Documents” allows you to print off all envelopes; they will be ready to be mailed, complete with barcode attached. “Send Email Messages” allows you to email the documents in attachment– HTML, or plain text formats.

*Note: When printing labels, place the labels facing down in the machine.*