Stuart Murgatroyd, CEO, at Data On Demand shares his experience in going out to market and selecting the right supplier to provide address data cleansing.
Their requirements were three fold:
1. A solution that would provide the highest match rates for address data cleansing.
2. The processing speed must be fast.
3. Able to use the solution in a hosted environment.
Bird College’s Mission is to be an outstanding and innovative international provider of education and professional training in Dance, Music and Musical Theatre.
They partner with AFD Software for address validation, email validation and phone validation to ensure student contact data is valid at the point of entry. Naomi Seal, Registry Manager, says:
“Addresses are important, and so are email addresses, phone numbers and mobile numbers. This applies to both students and next of kin. Emergencies do arise and that is not the time to find out the contact data is wrong!
With AFD, we have one solution that instantly validates email, phone, and address details. Any errors can be immediately corrected before they are saved to our database.
With AFD we have a choice of installed software and data, AFD hosted services – or the availability of both. We chose AFD hosted services because they have 100% uptime, and we no longer have the costs associated with carrying out software maintenance or keeping data up-to-date within our own infrastructure.”
Pictures from Bird College – Conservatoire for Dance and Musical Theatre ©.
Maintaining accurate and up-to-date contact data can feel like a huge mountain to climb.
AFD Software’s range of address, email, phone and bank validation solutions give you a clear view of your data.
Address Validation helps ensure address data entered into your websites, apps, and back-end systems are accurate in real time.
Email Validation uses a 3-point check system confirming the syntax, domain and local part are all correct, helping validate if the email is live and can receive your vital digital comms.
Phone Validation confirms the format and number of digits are correct depending on the country, our solution then pings the number, confirming its live.
Bank Validation confirms the sort code and account number are valid, essential for setting up direct debits and processing payments.
If you came across the address:
No Name Shop
1 No Name Street
Sandwich
CT13 9AJ
You might be forgiven for thinking there is an error and someone has manually filled in fields that were blank.
This is actually a correct address appearing on Royal Mails Postcode Address File (PAF) but highlights the importance of having a solution to check name and address data is correct as its entered into your systems and cleansed prior to mailing.
AFD Software’s address lookup API takes away the guess work and allows organisations to instantly validate name and address data at the point of entry.
See more information and try for yourself here.
Accurate address data is essential for mail to reach the intended recipient, when the contents are private and relating to legal matters, this requirement becomes even more important.
TRUE Solicitors LLP, who began life over 20 years ago as Gorman Hamilton, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, with just two partners and a secretary. Have combined hard work and success to grow to a workforce now staffed by 170 employees that specialise in the provision of legal advice and support to clients that have suffered due to personal injury.
“We’ve used address validation from AFD Software for nearly 10 years. Having the right address protects all parties by avoiding data breaches or delays that occur if papers go to the wrong address. Address verification provides an independent means of checking that we have not misheard, or mis keyed an address. AFD helps us protect our reputation, reduce risk, and retain clients.” True Solicitors, Dave Johnson, Head of IT.
EMG Solicitors is an award-winning Legal 500 firm based across the North East and Cumbria, with a national client base, specialising in Court of Protection, Deputyships, Family Law, Residential Conveyancing, Commercial Property, Litigation & Disputes, Employment Law and Wills, Trusts & Probate services.
We caught up with Martin Clark, Head of Business Systems and IT, to discuss how accurate address data helps the organisation speed up data entry, ensure data accuracy, and maintain its professional image.
“We use the case management system Liberate by Linetime which holds all our client data and case notes. Linetime recommended AFD’s address lookup solution to help us quickly and accurately enter client address data into the system from a postcode or first line of an address.
Prior to the introduction of AFD, staff typing in an address would consume more time and we lacked standardisation of address data. Some of the errors that I recall included town and city sometimes being all capitalised, sometimes the first letter capitalised, and other times all lowercase. We had Durham rather than County Durham, transposition of characters and address lines – all the expected errors where manual data entry and human error are allowed.
The main driver in stopping this and having accurate address data is staff time and reputation.
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!
Clients are paying for a professional service, if we are sending letters out and the address data is wrong this doesn’t reflect well. There is also a chance the address data is completely wrong and goes to the wrong person, a situation we must avoid.”
As EMG Solicitors provide conveyancing services (legal services of purchasing a property) they required the enhanced datasets within AFD’s address validation solution that shows new build properties or properties still under construction. Martin continues: “Standard address data on the Postcode Address File (PAF) doesn’t have the new build properties whilst still under construction or just completed. We need to find and validate these properties when our clients wish to purchase them. AFD showed us the Not Yet Built datasets from Royal Mail that include these properties and help us maintain an accurate address for a client’s new property from first enquiry through to completion.”
Summarising the address verification solution from AFD, Martin concludes: “Not a single person has come back to me saying ‘this doesn’t work, I can’t find the address’. The solution solves the challenge we had by speeding up data entry and making sure the address entered is accurate. I’d happily recommend the Postcode People at AFD Software for any organisations needing a fast, accurate addressing solution.
When you look on an issue from the outside the new perspective can make issues and their possible solutions clearer. While at University I worked as a retail sector shift-manager for a busy multinational restaurant chain.
To measure satisfaction, all customers were asked to complete an online survey in the restaurant prior to leaving. Many would abandon the task – saying it took too long. During a week the restaurant would serve around 900 customers. About 30 surveys would be completed each week, detailing what was good and bad about the customer’s experience – just 3%. If the completion rate could have been raised even to 10% that would have been 90 customers with feedback that could have better shaped the organisation.
Having made the switch from working in retail to computer software, I have gained a real understanding of how process can be key to successfully achieving objectives and desirable outcomes. Customers complained that the survey was time-consuming, especially from a smart phone. The most time-consuming part of the process was entering the address – yet that was essential for analysis of drive-time and demographic profiling. I can now see that there were just three necessary steps:
Having a survey system in place that was intuitive, fast, and accurate would have led to a higher percentage of completed surveys. Each one would bring more insight into how the business could improve, provide customers with specific offers and redeemable vouchers, and fill the restaurant during quiet times. Accurate contact data powered by AFD Software would have ensured the customer would have received their rewards and would have increased levels of customer satisfaction and growth for the restaurant.
AFD Software has been helping organisations in the retail sector streamline their address capture processes for the last 40 years. Thousands of organisations directly benefit from AFD Software’s address management solutions in a variety of environments. How could your organisation benefit? One of our Data Quality Consultants can help you identify how today! Call Joel Miller on 01624 811711 or Email joel.miller@afd.co.uk
How do you get to a place of confidence about your address data? Sintons have been on the journey. This is their story.
Sintons is a leading full-service law firm based in the Northeast of England serving businesses, individuals, and organisations in the region and beyond. With a turnover of £16 million, Sintons has 130 employees including over 70 lawyers and is utilising AFD Software solutions as part of a fundamental change to data management. How are they doing this?
David Mather, IT Manager at Sintons, really likes the way that AFD’s Address Lookup solution enables them to achieve so much at once: “We communicate daily with insurance companies and other law firms. The inclusion of DX Network member address details makes it easy for us to reduce postage costs and because DX deliver before 9 and collect after 5, the working day is extended – enhancing our response times to clients.” Difficult addresses, regional accents, poor handwriting – the things that lead to inaccuracy – are easily and quickly resolved with the powerful search functions of AFD’s Address Validation solutions… and these are fully integrated into the applications used intensively by our staff… the win is less staff time, better data and therefore service assurance.” “We previously had to conduct data updates out of work hours and reboot the server. With AFD’s address verification API these updates are automatic and maintenance-free – so scarce technical resource can be allocated elsewhere without compromising data quality”.
Sintons is embracing mobile technology as a keyway to empower staff, freeing them from routine tasks to focus on client need. David continues:
“Parts of our business acquire new customers outside the office environment. We have developed our own Android application which minimises data entry time while maximising the quality of data entered. Our team is free from cumbersome paperwork and able to focus more fully on the prospective clients’ needs. The Android version of AFD’s postcode lookup API Plus is part of a considered strategy to strengthen our business with mobile technology. It plays a significant role in reducing data entry from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.”
The process efficiency is now resulting in increased acquisition of new, valuable clients. Sintons now has a system in place that prevents any user inputting an incorrect address and a wider understanding of how important this is in order to maintain the highest levels of data integrity.
www.sintons.co.uk
AFD Software attended the SROC 23 conference in March to meet our 100+ customers in the HE sector that currently rely on AFD’s address lookup, email validation and phone validation solutions. We also met with Universities that do not currently use AFD’s data validation solutions.
We ran polls on each day with the following questions and results:
On the first day of SROC we asked; “What is the biggest source of poor-quality data at your institution?”
A) Students
B) Staff
C) UCAS
We had a clear winner with A) Students receiving 62% of votes, followed by B) Staff with 27% of the votes, and C) UCAS receiving 11% of the votes.
On the second day of SROC we asked delegates; “How do you rate the quality of your student contact data?”
A) Excellent
B) Needs Improvement
C) Poor
Thanks to all the participants, B) Needs Improvement was the landslide winner receiving 62% of votes, followed by C) Poor with 25% of the votes, and A) Excellent receiving 13% of the votes. Clearly AFD customers voted for A!
AFD Software helps over 100 Universities validate and/or cleanse student address, email, and phone data. Contact one of our specialists today to find out how we can help improve poor quality at your institution.
www.afd.co.uk/education
AFD Software attended the UCISA 23 conference in March in Liverpool to meet with IT teams from Universities across the UK and discuss challenges around student contact data accuracy (address, email and phone).
Did you know that over 100 Universities now rely on AFD’s address validation and address verification solutions to help ensure student address data is validated at the point of entry?
A growing number of institutions are now looking to validate email and phone data as well as cleanse the existing address, email and phone data they have.
More information and case studies can be seen at www.afd.co.uk/he-solutions
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.