We have been asked on several occasions why you need to specify which country a list pertains to and why can’t we just have an international setting.
The simple answer is accuracy, but let’s not leave it at that. I’d like to share with you some of the nuances that we see on a regular basis, to help you understand a little of the work that has gone on behind the scenes to ensure you get the best matching results possible.
In the coming months I will look to discuss country specific nuances in deeper detail and share the learnings and experiences that we have had matching data for large multi-national organisations across the globe. I’ll also show some of the approaches we have taken to tackle these issues at Match2Lists.
Needless to say, it’s not a case of one logic rule works for all. Different elements of an address need to be processed and interpreted in different ways, and country nuances can and do have significant impact on these rules. Specifying which country your list is related to helps Match2Lists use the most appropriate rules and logic to achieve the best matching results for you.
I would really like to see an ‘international’ setting where we know that the country value of each record uploaded is for example ISO3166 compliant.
Thus any standardisation necessary could happen on a record-by-record basis rather than an entire recordset basis.
Hi Joel – Thats an interesting idea, I have added your comments to the review list for the team, and we will look at how this could work and what the impact would be.
I would not be confident about lists being provided with ISO compliant country names / codes but that too could be handled.
It may be that this would be a pre-processing step as I am not sure that anyone would want to match French address data agsinst the UK or Germany etc.
Some of us are quite passionate about our countries being ISO compliant (http://www.provenworks.com/products/countrycomplete ) so I can be 100% sure that our customers are compliant
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My use case is where there are low volumes of data in each country list, so I may have 50 Irish addresses, 150 UK, 75 French etc. In this case I only want to match French to French but don’t want to spend as much time manipulating lists as actually performing the match. As the country is just an address line, if appropriately weighted then it should just drop through so we don’t attempt to match UK to France.
The other time this is useful is for de-duplication where again splitting the list by country doesn’t really add anything.
I do like you plugins for SalesForce.com, very nice idea – the more tools & quick wins that help improve data quality the better.