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.

For us, the biggest driver was the time saved by not having to key in data manually. On average we would make between 4 and 7 address checks on any new case, taking between 2 and 3 minutes to enter all the address data per case. On average we receive 2000 cases per month. That translates to a saving of between 4,000 and 6,000 minutes, 66 and 100 hours each month!

We deal with lots of suppliers so we know what a good supplier looks like! We see AFD as a partner rather than supplier. There is a can-do attitude that we get with everyone at AFD, nothing is an issue, promises are kept and pricing is fair that demonstrates a clear return on investment.

When contacting students, we found multiple instances where the email addresses and phone numbers provided were wrong. Each student studying at the college provides us with £5,000 per annum of vital funding, whilst students over 18 provide £2,000. Preventing one or two students from slipping through the net, because they would otherwise miss a key communication and fail to enrol, more than covers the cost of email and phone validation from AFD.