The UK’s Missing Parcel Problem: Why Address Accuracy Is Vital To Your Business
Losing parcels due to inaccurate addresses is a frustrating issue for retailers and customers.
According to research, 59% of consumers will be less likely to order from a retailer again if they have a negative delivery experience.
With 70% of UK online shoppers losing parcels due to poor addressing in 2022, it’s important for businesses to understand how address verification can help their business improve customer engagement and satisfaction, as well as enhance their overall business capabilities and increase their chances of repeat business and growth.
Understanding this, Jon Good, director of UK address validation and solutions company Hopewiser, goes into detail explaining why delivery address accuracy is vital to your business and the ways you can improve address verification.
What Is Address Verification?
Address verification is the process of confirming that the customer’s address is accurate and deliverable. The verification process, which is utilised by numerous industries, makes use of software that compares the accuracy of information across various systems and involves a data feed known as an application programming interface. Following that, address verification APIs can help improve data quality, maintain accurate records and reduce errors.
With accurate data verification, businesses may lower shipping costs, enhance customer checkout experiences, reduce failed deliveries, and improve their own customer data.
However, issues with address accuracy usually centre around two things;
- Complicated address forms and;
- A lack of address verification.
How Accurate Address Verification Can Help Your Business
A company may suffer financial loss and time wastage as a result of outdated, inaccurate customer address data. It’s easy to enter an address incorrectly and mistakes get made at every step of the process.
However, accurate address verification is crucial for your company because of this. 83% of companies believe that revenue is affected by inaccurate and incomplete customer data. By validating addresses, it helps to ensure a business’s customer data is accurate and up to date. Not only does this help deliveries reach their destination correctly and on time, but it also impacts and improves a business in other ways such as their marketing strategies, relationship management and conversion rates.
The Different Business Impacts
About 5% of all e-commerce forms contain errors. Nonetheless, these can be decreased by streamlining the process, making it easier for people to follow and complete. Doing so helps businesses to save time and money. Customers can quickly add their address details automatically without potential human error when including an address autofill option on your web page. From this, businesses are able to convert website and app visits into sales at a better rate by using a single address field rather than a time-consuming multi-field address form. This is achieved by not only decreasing the number of customer errors that may result in delivery issues but also speeding up a sometimes lengthy process.
Increased accuracy and reduced e-commerce cart abandonment are also both achieved by streamlining the checkout process via autofill choices for address validation. In the UK, 17% of carts are abandoned because of a difficult checkout process. This suggests that a company could see higher customer conversions as a result of improved address verification processes and quick autofill forms.
Because accurate address data can ensure that your customer relationship management is current and error-free, because of this, other departments within a company will get the information they need to be successful. Accurate and reliable address data can improve marketing strategies, enhance customer support, and forecast future trends for any business, helping a business launch into new markets.
Validating addresses help prevent failed delivery attempts by adding the correct delivery addresses to your shipping solutions. Address verification software allows businesses to check mailing addresses against an authoritative database to determine their validity, which in turn maximises a businesses chance of having the correct customer addresses in a CRM. This can decrease the number of order returns, improve the overall cancellation rate and strengthen a brand’s reputation and trust. Remember, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
Top 3 Address Validation Mistakes Your Business Must Avoid
When it comes to a business’s address data, inefficiency and inaccuracy can be easily solved. Have a look below to see address related mistakes, and find out how businesses can avoid them:
Not Using PAF
The Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) contains over 30 million delivery points, and is the UK’s most up-to-date address database. Using a software provider that PAF doesn’t power can lead to problems such as increased risk of misdeliveries due to inaccurate matches and complicated online transactions which may result in cart abandonment.
Considering PAF receives 4-5,000 updates per day, it is essential a business incorporates an address validation tool that uses this highly accurate dataset.
Having Disparate Address Validation Tools
46% of respondents to a survey claim disconnected data is negatively impacting their organisation’s ability to engage, support, and meet the needs of their customers. There are dangers of having disparate data; if a business has numerous systems in various departments, this can become problematic when updating the software. If certain tools receive updates more regularly or irregularly than others, this can cause conflicting output data, which then compromises the accuracy of customer information.
Having a centralised solution will help to avoid the problems that come with disparate systems. Not to mention businesses will benefit from cost savings with reduced licence fees and less maintenance time.
Not Making Use of Additional Datasets
19% of business decision makers express they have lost customers as a result of having incomplete or inaccurate information about them. Depending on the businesses target audience, additional datasets are sometimes required to enhance customer targeting. If the business fails to make use of extra datasets, such as Multiple Residence and Not Yet Built, verifying customer identities and ensuring delivery to the correct address could become an issue. This in effect could harm customer retention as well as making the company more susceptible to fraud.
Conclusion
Ultimately, for the success of a company, it must maintain a database of accurate, current addresses. Deliveries that are correct can save your business time and money while also improving the overall experience for your consumers. Recurring clients who are pleased with a product or service are more likely to tell others about it, helping to improve brand reputation and increase the likelihood of brand growth and loyalty.