With today’s electronic communications, WEB based sales & marketing, and global business environment, it is inevitable that some prospects and customers in a local or regional file will have addresses from other countries. The percentage of this data in your files may be small but it is growing, especially in prospect files that are purchased or rented.

A common problem in coping with such data is thinking that rigid local standards can be made to work for this foreign data.

Asking the input data to be formatted into detailed fields according to strict local rules is inviting assumptions and choices which can vary from person to person, country to country. This leads to country name in state fields or postal code fields, apparently invalid postal codes, postal codes in address line fields, etc.

Requesting input in unformatted or loosely formatted fields is the best way of obtaining reliability and completeness. If transaction and file formats for names and addresses are designed like the lines on an envelope you will be able to capture both local and foreign data with complete integrity. This will mean that the search and matching system should be designed to cope with unformatted data. Systems can be reliable in dealing with unformatted data, people are not reliable when they are asked to format data.

This approach is essential for multinational systems but also very relevant for maximum value in local systems.

Don’t try to overcome these problems before the data is stored. Let the system overcome them. Use simple large fields for names and addresses that allow users to input data as they would on an envelope or business card.