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.
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.