No-one enjoys manual data input.
The last thing anybody wants to spend their day doing is inputting the same type of data into a computer over, and over, and over again. This is especially poignant when there’s actual work to do with requirements and deadlines to fulfil.
CRMs are all about delivering value to you and your customers, but even the most popular systems lack crucial quality of life features surrounding manual data input.
There’s also an inherent security risk involved with it. The cost to an individual or business for sloppy work with data can be devastating.
Take financial services. As an individual, applying for a credit card or bank account with an overdraft relies on an Address Verification Check (AVS). This runs a background check on the address that you provide against officially registered addresses with financial institutions.
The purpose of the AVS check is to protect these institutions against potential fraud, but also validate information given for financial servicing. As this system is a database, it deals in exact details. If you input an address wrong, even if it’s a tiny innocent mistake, that can cause the AVS check to fail.
If you’re applying for credit, that’s a failure against your credit rating. Similar situations are valid in the case of businesses, whether you are applying to borrow credit, or working on behalf of a client applying for credit. The consequences can severely affect how you borrow money in the future.
All because the address wasn’t filled out correctly.
However, the importance of manual data input for healthy business operations means little when the prospect of doing laundry or filing taxes sound like more exciting chores. Complacency and mistakes can and often do creep in when faced with highly repetitive processes like data input.
Thankfully, if you’re a SugarCRM user, you can neutralise this potential threat with the new enable.services Google Places package.
The package works by adding a line to the top of the Billing & Shipping address fields of an Account Record, as well as Primary and Alternative Address fields in a Contact or Lead record. From here, simply start typing an address in the line and the checker kicks straight in with the closest results to your input.
Then it’s as simple as selecting the address you need from the list, and the module will fill in the rest for you.
No need for a Google or Post/Zip code lookup to copy across ever again!
The checker is linked to the Google Places lookup database, so it will only return results of addresses that are officially registered with Google.
This includes both validated residential and business addresses logged within the Google database. Whatever the address you need, from any country around the world, you can be safe knowing the correct address has been pulled in for both you and your clients.
The only prerequisite for the Google Places package is a key for the module to work from Google. The process is fairly simple, and we will release a guide to this once the module is available.
Google Places by enable.services will be available in the near future, implementable onto your system within a few minutes. Stay tuned for the official release.
