Omar's Blog - Enhance How Applications Capture Customer Address Using JQUERY and C#

Enhance How Applications Capture Customer Address Using JQUERY and C#

Jan 9

Written by: Omar Francisco
1/9/2010 11:16 AM

An accurate customer database is one of the most valuable assets a business can have. Incorrect customer addresses increase the cost of doing business and reduces profit margins. In May 17 of 2009, The United States Post Office published in the National Postal Forum Summit the annual cost of Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA) mail is estimated to be $1.856 billion. 12.4% of this amount is related to addresses with bad elements. Figure 1 contains a breakdown of the different reasons why mail is not delivered. The cost of fixing a customer address varies depending on the complexity of a business process or the stage of the process at which the address discrepancy is found. This article analyses a couple of cost effective and easy to implement solutions to reduce the number of records with incorrect address due to bad address elements.

USPS Failure Chart
Figure 1

For a company like Amazon, a shipment with a bad address represents additional cost and an exception in the business process. For a smaller company like the guys mowing my lawn, a bad address represents a delay in revenue since customers cannot be billed on time. Independently of the business line or application for which you want to introduce the techniques outlined in this blog, it is important to understand the scope of the problem and quantify the cost to the business. This information will allow you to measure the effectiveness of the proposed solutions at different time periods after implementation. Financial matters aside, let's discuss specifics.

Figure 2 illustrates a HTML form capturing a customer address. Similar forms can be found in e-commerce web sites or in-house applications. The layout of the form is human friendly and does not give the application an opportunity to proactively fill in address information based on related data elements. The user is required to enter the entire address and at that point the address is ready for validation.

sample form
Figure 2

Figure 3 rearranges the form to allow the application to obtain related data elements as the operator enters information. This approach enhances the user experience and increases the accuracy of the address information. An additional visual element has been introduced to display the address in USPS format. This implementation uses the following data elements relationships.

• A successful reverse telephone lookup can generate the customer address.
• A zip code lookup can generate the city and state of the address. This will require the customer/operator to enter only the street address.

enhanced form
Figure 3

Figure 4 provides an implementation aimed to Customer Service Representatives (CSR). It provides a similar address resolution scheme to the previous solution. It also adds value by including an embedded Google map and enhanced spelling for targeted fields using NATO phonetic alphabet. This last feature is activated by placing the mouse over the field label and is a result of observing CSR work with different customers while creating new accounts or making modifications to existing ones. A CSR usually spells back to the customer email, city, address and name. In my experience the number of fields that get spelled back to the customer depends on factors such as familiarity of the customer or CSR with the English language, speaker accent, quality of phone connection or complexity of the data. For instance 30 Maine Street can be easily understood as 30 Main Street due to any of the conditions previously listed.

CSR Form
Figure 4

Another advantage of introducing a common spelling solution is the NATO phonetic alphabet can be replaced or modified to include words that mask the CSR accent. This facilitates the communication between customer and CSR and provides consistency to the task of spelling information back to the customer. 30 Main Street will be unambiguously spelled by all CSRs as three, zero, Mike, Alfa, India, November, Space, Sierra, Tango, Romeo, Echo, Echo, Tango.

See article links to download a fully functional demo based on Figure 4. The implementation uses JQuery and C#. The technical approach is simple. After a full telephone number is entered a web service is called asynchronously to perform a reverse phone lookup against a data provider. This allows the CSR to continue filling out the form while the reverse lookup is executed. A successful reverse lookup updates all relevant address elements and the Google map. Figure 5 illustrates a sequence diagram of the reverse phone lookup. As a side note, the diagram was generated with the online sequence diagram generator provided by Web Sequence Diagram.

Figure 5

The zip code resolution uses a similar approach, except instead of calling a web service a rest end point hosted at www.geonames.org is called directly from the presentation layer. To expand the example connectors for reverse phone lookup for multiple providers are included with the code. Note, the usage of public websites to screen scrape telephone information is not recommended for critical applications and may violate the terms of use of the targeted site. Consider the usage of this technique in the context of the provided code as a pedagogical instrument.

To run the provided example, download and run in debug mode. The project is configured to run inside the web server embedded in Visual Studio and launch the address.html page. Once the page comes up perform the following tests.

Enter a telephone number - some have been provided as example. While entering the cell information the address associated with the phone number will be populated. The map is not refreshed until the focus is moved from the current field.
Put the mouse on the label of fields with the spelling icon. The NATO phonetic spelling will be display if the field contains text.
Press the spelling icon. This will display a dialog with the NATO phonetic spelling in both English and Spanish and allow modification of the field.
Enter a valid zip code; both the state and city will be updated with the right values.

Reverse phone lookup combined with resolution of city and state from a zip code can increase the accuracy of a customer address and reduce the time it takes a CSR to capture this information. Phonetic spelling can standardize the way information is spelled back to the customer and alleviate language related problems. These techniques combined reduce the number of bad addresses in your application database and the time CSRs spend with customers.