Free web form e-book

I released today my new book: “Better data quality from your web form - Effective international name and address Internet data collection”. The good news is that it is completely free to download and use, so go to http://www.grcdi.nl/book4.htm to download it. Spread the word!

Web forms are a source of immense and continuous frustration for many people as the forms almost universally fail to take any account of variations in personal name and addressing conventions used throughout the world, so that customers have to struggle to clear the hurdles placed in their way by the forms. Reports suggest that almost 9 out of 10 customers have problems when attempting to carry out online transactions, and the result is a huge loss of income from lost custom paired with the collection of very poor quality data.

This e-book (in Acrobat pdf format), which is free to download and use, attempts to fill the gap left by most works about usability by concentrating on the experience that your international customers have with your form, and how it affects them, their relationship with you and your data quality.

This has been done using many examples and without going into too much depth about the idiosyncrasies of international personal names and addresses, and avoids technical discussions – links to get more information are provided where appropriate in the text.

Any feedback is most welcome.

Enjoy!

New product releases at GRC Database Information

We've been busy in March preparing updates for most of our products. These include:

- an update to the Global Sourcebook for Address Data Management

- a new release for many of our data tables: place name/postal codes, address elements, job titles and others

- a new version of our address parsing, standardisation and formatting software GRCTools.

More information on our website.