The Postcode People
your address & data quality partners

Address data is fundamental to excellent customer service. The process needs to be straightforward, integrated, and 100% reliable across all our systems. One of WPA’s key requirements was that any potential supplier must work directly with Royal Mail. This helped narrow the field and helped AFD Software stand out. I would absolutely recommend the service. From integration to ongoing support, everything has been well-executed. We expect a lot from our suppliers and the Postcode People at AFD more than measured up to our expectations.

When we say that the AFD Refiner engine is best-in-class, we say so after a thorough comparison and examination of multiple dimensions. Our previous supplier’s account management was not at the required level. From initial engagement, the team at AFD Software responded the fastest, and developed a relationship of partnership rather than transaction. This continued through testing, our bespoke development requirements, go-live, and ongoing support. If you need address data cleansing – partner with The Postcode People at AFD Software.

We have always had issues with other software, updates would break a process or make it work differently. With AFD we don’t have that anxiety, we have confidence. Part of this confidence is that the Postcode People at AFD do what they say they are going to do. That’s not just the tech, it is every person I’ve met. They’re a bunch of straightforward real people and that’s good to deal with. We want all users of CarsVansAndBikes.com to have a positive experience from registration through to vehicle sales or purchases. To achieve this, we need all elements of the system to work in harmony, and central to this are partners we trust – like AFD Software.

Staff time is reduced by simply typing in a postcode and selecting an address, saving potentially 25 seconds per address. This might sound minimal but when we search 20,000 addresses per year this is almost 140 hours a year! Not a single person has come back to me saying ‘this doesn’t work, I can’t find the address’. I’d happily recommend the Postcode People at AFD Software for any organisations needing a fast, accurate addressing solution.

AFD’s solution takes a UPRN and returns the valid address record, making it much easier for our technical consultants to set up and configure the system and confirm that all eligible properties are accurately included.

If we need to add or remove addresses, we can do so quickly and accurately using the UPRN, knowing we aren’t creating or just removing duplicates, which means we don’t need to review the entire database.

It gives us one less thing to maintain and worry about. We had the option for an installed or hosted solution and went down the hosted route to ensure our customers can still place orders in the event of our own systems failure.

Whilst address validation is great, errors in the entry of the data or address selection are more likely to creep in on a mobile device. To overcome this and shave a few more seconds off the checkout process, we worked with AFD Software to implement AFD’s new Geolocation address lookup. This allows a customer to press a button, then select their address. Two button taps and all the address data is entered accurately.

We’ve relied on AFD’s Address Lookup solutions since the turn of the century. After a recent review, we confidently decided to continue with AFD Software– their solutions are robust, reliable and bug-free – they always work. We are fully satisfied that AFD is delivering the best value for money and a solution that is proven to deliver on our regulatory and customer needs.

The PFA quarterly magazine ‘4 The Player’ is sent to all PFA members. Before we signed up with AFD, hundreds of these magazines were being returned as “undeliverable” due to the poor quality of the address. The magazine is an important part of the member benefits package and we had to do everything possible to ensure each member received it, so we looked for a better solution.

We have to ensure that our systems are not a cause of failure when an individual is completing a membership application. To facilitate this, our systems have been designed to make that initial joining experience as smooth and pain-free as possible. Introducing an error is very easy to do, especially when reading an account number and sort code from a card and typing them in.

The Centre has a data quality policy in place, part of the outworking of this policy is validating patient details within the PAS. This means any staff at The Centre who use the PAS and register patients requires the functionality to validate contact data at the point of entry. We would recommend other trusts to sit down with AFD and see how they can improve their data quality processes.

Without the AFD element, a route planner would have to plan the route by manually locating it using mapping software and dropping a ‘pin’. This would be a relatively quick process in isolation, but we have over 1600 vans distributing from over 100 depots. This job is done in a time-pressurised environment and, without the quality data that AFD provide, it would quickly lead to frustration for the route planners and needlessly slow down the process.