What is Address Management ?

Address Management is the process of ensuring that the address information held by an organisation is as accurate as possible and, through the availability of accurate addresses, that communication with its clients or customers is as efficient as possible.

Successful Address Management can help make an organisation more efficient and reduce costs associated with customer communication.

The process of Address Management covers the range of tasks associated with managing address data, from capturing the data in the first place, through the maintenance of the accuracy of the address record to the elimination of outdated information. Each of these tasks can be aided at each step by the use of appropriate Address Management tools.

These are the fundamentals of Address Management, but a successful Address Management policy that uses the most appropriate tools can bring additional benefits.

How can my Organisation benefit from Address Management ?

The benefits of a successful Address Management strategy include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Efficient delivery of mail
• Reduced costs on failed delivery and returned goods
• Maintaining a professional company image
• Better profiling of customer base through linkage to geographical data
• Easy capture of accurate addresses through Rapid Addressing
• Correction or elimination of out-of-date customer information through regular database "cleaning" via Address Matching , helping to sustain the benefits of accurate addresses throughout the lifetime of the data

The benefits of increased efficiency and reduced costs associated with the possession of accurate information, efficiently captured, are clear to any business. Address Management products help an organisation not only to capture accurate information in the first place, but also to maintain the information gathered.

What makes for a successful Address Management Strategy ?

The three key features of a successful approach to managing addresses, and the mechanisms for ensuring that they are met, can be categorised as:

• An Accurate and Comprehensive Source of Address Data

  Royal Mail's PAF^® (Postcode Address File) provides the most comprehensive and accurate source of address information in the UK.

  It contains 28 million addresses and is constantly updated by, among others, the army of postmen and women who deliver the mail throughout the country, ensuring that it accurately reflects the actual situation in each locality. No other source of address information can come close to this level of first-hand knowledge, comprehensiveness or continual update.

  Although developed by the Royal Mail for its own uses, value added resellers (VARs) such as Allies Computing can make PAF^® available to your organisation and keep it up-to-date with regular updates.

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• Initial Capture of Correct Address Information

  At data entry, the importance of ensuring that the address information being entered into your system is correct cannot be overstressed, it is the first and often the last chance to make a good impression on customers and because, if data is incorrect when first entered into the system, it is harder to correct it at a later stage. Batch database checking and cleaning tools can be used to correct this data later, but the chances of successfully updating a database is still dependent on how good the data was in the first place.

  Rapid Addressing tools are often the best way to capture addresses quickly and accurately; a whole address is generated by simply entering a postcode and premise number or organisation name. Use PostCoder applications to take customer details over the telephone, where speed of data entry is important and the chance of mishearing a full address spoken by the customer is relatively high.

  Address Matching tools can also be used to produce a full address and are employed where the information available is not complete or incorrect (e.g. where a customer does not know the postcode, or gets it wrong). PostCoder is able to generate lists of matching addresses from combinations of street name, post-town and house number.

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• Keeping Address Data Clean

  Address data is not static: people move, houses are built or demolished and Royal Mail have a rolling programme of changes to the Postcode system to make it more efficient. For these reasons, and also to remove mistakes made when entering addresses, it is important regularly to verify and modify an address database in order to ensure that all the records remain accurate.

  The job of cleaning address lists in this way is usually delegated to batch products, utilising the same Address Matching approach outlined above, but applied non-interactively. Typically where addresses need to be changed, they can be automatically updated. Where doubtful or ambiguous addresses are found, which cannot be automatically amended, a list is produced to enable manual correction decisions to be made.

  Such Address Matching tools can also be used to clean an existing, but unverified address database.

How Can Allies Computing Help ?

The PostCoder family of Address Management products represent more than 14 years of experience in the field of address matching, particularly in response to the requirements of the NHS, where holding an accurate patient address is not just desirable, but essential and required legally.

PostCoder ensures accurate data through the use of the Royal Mail's PAF^®. Royal Mail have recognised this through the award of the contract to Allies Computing to supply the UK Addresses range of Address Management applications, sold under the Royal Mail's own banner, and incorporating the same matching engine and enhanced PAF^® file used in PostCoder. PostCoder can be supplied at premise or thoroughfare level for the full UK or specified local areas.

Facilities for Rapid Addressing and Address Matching are available as standard in all the non-thoroughfare PostCoder products, ensuring swift and accurate data capture into any database, with the addition of the ability to manually search the entire PAF^® by keyword. We are continually improving and increasing these interactive features of PostCoder, particularly to ensure as close an integration with your existing applications and ways of working as possible. Our PostCoder product is our main interactive, desktop Rapid Addressing and Address Matching product.

Alternatively you can build all the Address Management facilities of PostCoder into your own products or web site via the PostCoder API

PostCoder Web provides an easy to implement rapid addressing solution for your web site.

Data Cleaning of Address databases is provided by our Batch PostCoder.