Dr Tim Drye has decades of experience in data and statistics. He sits on the Royal Mail’s PAF Advisory Board and his companies help organisations overcome their data and statistical challenges. He shares his experience with AFD and gives his feedback on the latest solutions available.
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.
When you rely on Software as a Service (SaaS) you need confidence that the provider of that service is competent and can prove consistent availability and scalability. With thousands of organisations across the world relying on our services, we are continuously investing in our hosted infrastructure.
So how do we achieve 100% uptime – we’ve had no outages, no partial outages, no degraded performance – in two years? A few basics: stay humble, plan ahead, constantly monitor, keep building team skill and knowledge, implement the very best technologies and practices – invest in the right tools and rigorously test.
What are some of the practices that are delivering outstanding levels of uptime second by second, building to year by year? Our network is optimised so that thousands of simultaneous requests for (say) address validation can be processed with users receiving immediate responses. This is called low latency.
When there are spikes and increases in demand for our services, we are ready to respond instantly with increased capacity. We achieve this by enabling our hosted services to automatically enlarge – which is known as lightweight virtualisation technology. These extra resources are deployed quickly, reliably, and consistently. We also anticipate that faults happen and use additional machines which allow connections to still be made available if another machine fails (“Quorum Nodes”), to improve resiliency and fault tolerance. AFD continues to invest heavily in technologies that deliver maximum speed, reliability, and availability.
While we have maintained a 100% uptime track record for the past two years, we understand that technology can sometimes be unpredictable, and unexpected challenges may arise. Do we want to maintain 100%? Yes! That’s why our quest for excellence is never over – our dedicated teams will continue to use best practice, available technologies and ongoing testing to maintain the highest levels of service. In summary – we care, we invest, we want to be the best. Our goal is simple. Happy Customers.
Does your organisation have absolute confidence in its address, bank, and contact data? AFD Software is on hand to help with all your data quality needs. Contact Joel Miller on 01624 811709 or email joel.miller@afd.co.uk.
Beaverbrooks is a thriving, multichannel retail jewellery business with over 1,200 colleagues and 80 stores nationwide. With more than a century of expertise helping customers find the right diamonds, jewellery and watches, Beaverbrooks have applied the best operational technology to support customer retention and growth in this competitive space. In 2021/2022 Beaverbrooks had their most successful year ever, with over £200 million in turnover.
Head of IT, Patrick Walker, and IT Systems Development Manager, Vicki Olthoff, have 50 years of combined experience implementing and maintaining multi-channel retail systems. They wanted to bring a new level of consistency, automation and reliability to customer and prospect data validation, and after conducting a careful review of their needs and the marketplace, they made the upgrade to AFD Software. We wanted to find out how Patrick and Vicki took the selection decision and understand the immediate and expected business impacts.
Patrick says: “From one company we sought five things: 1. A single source solution covering off fast, accurate, consistent contact data entry across all channels. 2. A reliable service that removed anxiety. 3. A process for complete data cleansing including suppressions which would show the highest levels of diligence in the GDPR data accuracy principle. 4. A combination of the highest percentage of accurate automated data cleansing, combined with the fastest processing rates. 5. To put in a new solution and forget it – because it just works.”
Even with strong commercial, technical, and functional reasons to change their address validation and data cleansing supplier – Beaverbrooks were still keen to minimise risk. Their due diligence on AFD included reference sites, product testing, integration evaluation, assessment of technical skills and evaluation of AFD Software as a company.
Vicki reports: “For the past three years we’ve had AFD Software in action on our web platform for validating and speeding up contact data entered by customers. It is also being used by staff in our stores as part of our bespoke Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) and we’re integrating it into our Order Management System (OMS) and our Customer Data Platform (CDP).”
Thousands of customers place orders each week in Beaverbrooks stores, on the website, by post, by phone and via partners such as Next and Shop Direct. This complex operation is supported by a variety of systems including EPOS, Web, Mail Order, OMS and CDP which work together as a single ecosystem.
Vicki continues: “When customer data is received from so many different channels it is important that the validation sources are from a single, complete, and accurate source. Whatever the channel used, by colleagues or customers, we want a consistent contact data entry experience. This was another key consideration in choosing AFD. When the rollout is complete, all these systems will have a touchpoint back onto the AFD solutions.”
Beyond this, Beaverbrooks is conscious of its GDPR responsibilities and recognise that customer data degrades over time. To help keep contact data accurate Beaverbrooks also switched to AFD Software to provide services to cleanse address data and detect customers who have moved or are now deceased.
Patrick adds: “Because the customer is at the forefront of everything we do, we want that journey, that www.afd.co.uk/addreSS-lookuPcustomer experience, to be the best it can be. AFD is an essential part of delivering minimum friction and maximum accuracy at crucial parts in that journey.
This has tangible impacts across the business. Purchases are more likely, deliveries go to the right place, our communications arrive – the result is happy customers and increased internal efficiency.
One error in an email address makes it undeliverable – and mistakes in data entry are easy in a busy store.
Vicki explains: “Email is an important way to engage with customers and to encourage them to return to our stores. This relies on the accuracy of the email addresses recorded by customers and colleagues. To maximise accuracy, we now use the AFD live email validation service. The instant check enables immediate correction of any mistakes. This ensures our communications are deliverable from the outset.
Increasing deliverability, whether by post or email, means that our communications get to more people who get more opportunities to come into our stores. It’s a real win-win.”
Patrick continues: “AFD is a great fit for us. We have found the Postocde People at AFD’s technical and support skills and responsiveness to be both very helpful and very good. AFD solutions provide real flexibility of implementation from a unified service that works across all our systems and platforms. The options of on-site installation and hosted services build in a high level of resilience and stability. Our experience with AFD compared with others in this space is very positive: the solutions are very good to use, and we get a personal service. In fact, in terms of culture and philosophy and values we’re very similar.”
Vicki concludes: We’re glad we did the due diligence on AFD Software – they passed the tests – and we are confident we took the right decision for the business – and we are already reaping rewards.
Does your organisation have absolute confidence in its address, bank, and contact data? AFD Software is on hand to help with all your data quality needs. Contact Joel Miller on 01624 811709 or email joel.miller@afd.co.uk.
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. Bird College’s 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 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
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.