Yep, sorry for being too vague.
1. We exported a list of our customers into Excel from our SQL database and this is what I need to be clean.
2. What are we matching against...I suppose I have to figure this out. As a test I have already imported the .csv file into an ArcGIS Online map as a layer and it generally did what I expected it to do, namely I got a bunch of points on the map of where our customers are located. In my excel sheet I have a column for (street address, street address 2(P.O. box, etc.), city, state, zip, zip+4).
I think Chris was helpful by saying:
"In general, I would say a one-shot perfect geocoding run is not possible outside of a classroom. You can get many of them to work by geocoding in the first try, but there will always be some addresses that will elude the process. Then one has investigate them and maybe correct the data, and do several followup geocoding runs with different settings to finally get them to work. Expect the ones that don't work the first time to take a bit of effort to resolve."
I admit to some degree I was hoping it would just work especially since it's over 5000 addresses!