“Our mission, our purpose — is to make sure every contact record in every system is accurate, genuine, and as up-to-date as it possibly can be.”

Service Objects is the leader of real-time contact validation APIs. We are committed to providing software developers and programmers the best data quality tools including address and email verification, geolocation targeting and data cleansing. Our real-time APIs support a variety of programming languages including Java, C# and PHP to make integration quick and flawless.

Service Objects has verified over 1.7 billion contact records for clients from various industries including retail, technology, government, leisure, utilities, and finance. Since 2001, thousands of businesses have used our services to validate transactions to reduce fraud, increase conversions, and enhance incoming leads, online orders, and customer lists.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you talk about how Service Objects initially started as a web development company and why you decided to start focusing on data quality?

Geoff: As we worked on web development and ecommerce projects and continued to see business grow, we quickly learned that many of our clients were increasingly getting a lot of fraudulent sign-ups, address misspellings and incomplete contact data via their online forms. One of our clients told us every bogus contact record cost them $100 in lost productivity. To remedy this problem, we began developing data validation solutions that eventually evolved into what Service Objects focuses on today. We build data quality tools to ensure that each contact record in our customer’s databases is genuine, accurate, and up-to-date.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you elaborate on the importance of having client data that is genuine, accurate, and and up-to-date?

Geoffrey: Absolutely! We believe that making sure contact data is as genuine, accurate and up-to-date are the three most vital components in data quality excellence. We often refer to genuine, accurate, and up-to-date — without it, data quality excellence cannot be achieved. Let me give you an example: A person can inadvertently input a typo into his or her contact information, which makes the data inaccurate. Or, someone inputs an accurate address for a vacant address and uses a celebrity name like Bart Simpson in lieu of a real name; this information is not genuine. Finally, to ensure the utmost in quality, you must verify the data is up-to-date. If there is an issue with any of these three components, a company can waste an exorbitant amount of time, money and natural resources.

Again, (I must sound like a broken record) our goal is and will always be to make sure every contact record in every database is as accurate, genuine and up-to-date as it can be.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you share how your company culture has been built from four core values and how they have helped shape the direction and vision of Service Objects?

Geoffrey: From the beginning, I have focused on a company culture that revolves around four core values: a fun and healthy workplace, customer service excellence, outstanding network performance and corporate conservation. First and foremost is creating a healthy and happy work environment for everyone, as I believe this directly correlates to providing stellar customer service and achieving network up-time excellence. Similar to the key data quality components, these three are all necessary for a service-oriented company. We find our customers want to work with happy people who like their jobs.

Our fourth value is corporate conservation. This is very close to my heart as I’m a big outdoors man, and believe that data quality should be part of every company’s efforts to minimize waste. All our services, at their root, help our clients’ reduce waste. Last month our address validation tool identified millions of bogus and incomplete mailing addresses for our clients; and this resulted in a savings of over 300 tons of mail not being mailed. We also practice what we preach – we recycle, use highly efficient virtualized servers, and use sustainable office supplies. Every employee is conscious of how they can positively impact our conservation efforts.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some of the best ways that companies can protect themselves against fraud?

Geoffrey: According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), organizations around the world lose an estimated five percent of their annual revenues to fraud. More and more proactive businesses are leveraging their data and validation tools like ours to weed out bogus online transactions. With a data validation service, companies can compare the location of the shopper’s computer with the phone and mailing address to identify fraud. For instance, our product, DOTS Order Validation, fights fraud by reviewing and cross-referencing over 200 data points to ensure orders are genuine, accurate and deliverable.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about or think that our readers should be paying attention to?

Geoffrey: Big data is now allowing businesses to reduce waste, identify fraud, and helping them be more efficient. The barriers to seamlessly integrate validation, enrichment, and standardization of customer data within their internal systems has fallen. I predict in the next five years that most companies will outsource their data management needs so they can maximize the value of this critical asset — their customer list.