Thompson & Morgan, the UK’s largest mail order retailer of both seeds and plants, play a key part in stocking our gardens and green spaces. Since 1855 when its first seed catalogue was published, the organisation has been fulfilling its customers’ gardening needs. Today, the organisation serves multiple generations of gardeners via published catalogues, a call centre, and an award-winning website.
Synonymous with quality and delivering on high customer expectations, Thompson & Morgan chose AFD Software to provide address validation to both the website and call centre, ensuring their high levels of service improve even further.
Address accuracy for any mail order company is essential, reducing wasted costs of failed deliveries and mailings to incorrect addresses. When the items being delivered are perishable (like living flowers, plants, and trees), this necessity increases further.
Andrew Crees, Group IT Director, also highlights the time-saving element: “Customer calls are valuable, we need the conversation to focus on serving customers rather than on confirming the spelling of addresses. I know from experience living in Wales the pain of placing an order when you must spell out every single part of your address.
When customers enter their delivery details online or over the phone, finding a full address is as simple as entering the postcode to see a list of possible results. When a user only gives part of an address; the house name and street, for example, the solution returns valid addresses that match.”
Many organisations view integration and the anticipated amount of work involved as one of the biggest barriers to change when looking at new software implementations.
In response to these concerns, Andrew says: “When rolling out our new enterprise resource planning system, the software developers recommended AFD as they knew it could seamlessly integrate within our chosen platform. We found this whole process to be very straightforward and AFD plugged in hassle-free.”
Integration aside, Thompson & Morgan wanted to ensure that the latest available data was used to validate customer addresses with AFD’s postcode lookup API. Andrew continues: “We needed a solution that would be kept up to date. AFD offers frequent data updates to its products helping ensure addresses entered are validated against the latest version of the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF). We never have difficulties finding a customer’s address, which is a great benefit.”
When asked for the key reasons why Andrew would recommend using AFD, he answers: “From our initial contact, The Postcode People at AFD were on hand to help not only on a technical front but also through pre-sales, demonstrations and trialling the product. We have a working relationship that has always felt like a good fit; working with a company that is there to help and assist rather than fight against our requirements is refreshing.”
For a demonstration on how AFD’s solutions can be implemented into your systems and deliver fast, accurate address lookup from the most up to date sources, contact Joel Miller on 01624 811711 or email postcode@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.