Yorkshire Water use Names & Numbers to find customer contact name and address details faster – with as many phone numbers as possible.

A clean, fresh glass of water, flushing the toilet, watering the plants – it’s as easy as turning on the tap! We don’t need to think of the huge infrastructure, investment and planning that brings a consistent supply to the door. But water customers do have questions, want to report incidents and discuss their account. Yorkshire Water needs to make this customer contact easy both for the 1.7 million households they serve, and their own staff. Most of this work is handled by Loop, a dedicated customer services centre.

Both Loop and Yorkshire Water used a third party system to look up residential and commercial contact details. Available to all 4,000 employees, most of the use is by the customer services centre. The system was being reviewed and the procurement team contacted AFD Software to invite them to participate in a trial for the selection of a directory service.

Customer Relationship Manager at Loop, Nigel Fieldhouse said: “Through the process we were hoping to find a faster way of retrieving contact details, and a more comprehensive set of commercial and residential data – with as many phone numbers as possible.“

Nigel continued “After the demonstrations and presentations, we conducted detailed testing of data quality and coverage. We carefully compared the results from each of the products we were assessing. Names & Numbers from AFD Software came out ahead with the results being both more complete and more up-to-date.”

Vimla Mistry, award-winning credit collections manager was keen to look closely at how users would interact with the product: “Lack of clarity in the interface and ‘information overload’ can distract users and waste time. Of course the objective is the opposite of this. We want people to find what they need – more quickly.”

Nigel added “AFD Software assigned two specialists to look at our working environment and processes and to understand exactly what our staff were doing now and how this could be made more efficient. They showed us all that Names & Numbers could offer – and how this fitted to our precise requirements.“

Vimla continued “We often need to find a particular type of organisation or a specific person within a certain radial distance from an address. AFD proposed a clean, yet complete interface which gave staff all they needed – without ‘noise’ or distraction.”

Namita Mistry ran the procurement process: “A variety of implementation options were available from AFD and they liaised closely with the Yorkshire Water IT Team. It was decided to opt for a customised browser interface, entirely hosted, updated and maintained by AFD. This meant we did not need to use valuable internal IT resources for development, testing, deployment, maintenance and hardware resources – AFD do all the work.”

Namita continued “We had a clear time-line for implementation and the customised interface was delivered on-time, met the specification and satisfied the security requirements of our IT team. AFD Names & Numbers is now in use across the whole organisation as part of a long term agreement.“

Nigel summarised the experience of users “The users cannot get over how fast Names & Numbers is. The information is up-to-date and fresh. We are getting a lot of results we were not able to get previously. Names & Numbers is just better than any product we have previously used. The interface has a unique ‘Fast Find’ system where our users type in the search information into a single field and it works out and returns what you’re looking for. Our searches are simply faster to make and more likely to be successful.”

Yorkshire Water also utilises AFD Postcode products on its web site and internally to help deliver even better customer service and keep down internal costs.

Vimla concludes “We would definitely recommend Names & Numbers to anyone looking for a comprehensive reference to UK names and addresses.”

Pulling Together
Thomas Sanderson has grown from a family-run business into a national company providing Conservatory Blinds, Window Blinds and Shutters. Right now, even during the recession, the firm continues to thrive

Many factors are at play including a definite sense of community and ‘pulling together’ which retains the magic of the family-run business. Also, the blinds and shutters are at the quality end of the market – everything is handmade – and design consultants and installers are highly professional.

Marketing Activity
There is a strong focus on marketing and lead generation activities. A wide range of channels are used including direct mail, page advertising, outbound telemarketing, partnerships with conservatory and building firms, referrals from designers and internet promotion. The sales and marketing activity means that Thomas Sanderson has a database of over a million records and sends a significant volume of direct mail each month.

Jane Nichols, responsible for fulfilling brochure requests, says: “Contact data arrives daily from a variety of sources in electronic format. However, the data formats and the quality of the address data differ widely and contain errors and omissions such as a missing town. We have to be able to fix this quickly, every day”

Foundation for Communication
Jane, who operates AFD Refiner daily for cleansing batches of address data, continues: “It doesn’t matter what format the data is received in – Refiner will put it into the format we use for address data and sort out poor spelling, missing postcodes and the many other errors that occur with address data. Refiner lays a good foundation for professional communication and analysis. During cleansing Refiner adds the Delivery Point Suffix (DPS) which makes it even easier to identify potential duplicate records and to avoid adding these to the database.” Thomas Sanderson is now taking automation a step further by integrating entirely automatic cleansing using the Refiner API.

Kelly Dubrok, Thomas Sanderson Planning and Insights Manager underlines the importance of this process: “We are a large user of carefully targeted Direct Mail, sending well over a million items each year. The mail needs to arrive at its destination – without irritating and annoying errors in the name or address and duplicate envelopes. Using AFD helps us get these important details right.”

Welcoming and Fast
Gary Cornish is an Appointing Operator who works in the team which receives hundreds of inbound telephone calls each day from potential customers requesting brochures. He explains: “Callers expect the phone to be answered without delay and their details to be recorded efficiently. We can’t control when people will call – which means there can be ‘peaks’ in the number of people calling. When this happens we need to be both welcoming and fast.”

Gary continues “Names & Numbers is fully integrated with our internally written systems. We just ask the caller for the first line of their address and the postcode. AFD help us minimise the number of abandoned calls during peak times by reducing the time taken to enter these details byup to 90%. Where we cannot find the accurate address from the postcode we can ‘reverse search’ by any details such as street name and number or telephone number.”

Unscramble and Translate
Other leads and enquiries are received by fax and on handwritten lists – these too must be unscrambled and entered accurately into the Thomas Sanderson database. Kelly explains: “At exhibitions some visitors will only give us their postcode, name and house number – it’s up to us to translate this into accurate data so that we can follow-up.” In each of these cases AFD Names & Numbers is deployed to rapidly validate name and address data and to weed out suspicious contact details.

What we want – for the right price
For over fourteen years, as the Thomas Sanderson business has grown, their use of the AFD Postcode range has grown with them. Initially the firm used AFD Postcode which validates addresses to street level. Today both Names & Numbers and Refiner are a core part of the processes that ensure wherever new sales leads or prospect lists are entered, they are validated. Declan Hillier, Lead Developer for Thomas Sanderson internal systems, concludes: “As the business continues to develop we are upgrading our systems. Having looked at alternatives, we have decided to stay with AFD and are migrating Names & Numbers to .NET. AFD don’t charge for platform migration or for program upgrades. Names & Numbers and Refiner do what we want, at the right price.”

www.thomas-sanderson.co.uk