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Incorrect customer addresses hinder sustainability efforts
These issues are largely caused by having inaccurate customer addresses, which is important when around 20 percent of addresses entered online contain errors. Also, customer data lacking regular intervention degrades by two percent each month, meaning around 25 percent of customer data on databases will become inaccurate over the course of a year as people move home, get divorced and pass away.
Address verification is key
A vital way to solve this is to undertake address verification to ensure accurate deliveries, first time. Doing so helps to avoid costly failed deliveries, which are not only damaging to the environment, but financially; and are caused by incorrect or incomplete addresses, leading to return to sender and redelivery.
Address verification supports optimized routing, which leads to reduced miles driven per delivery, with lower fuel consumption and emissions, along with faster, more accurate fulfilment.
Furthermore, having the correct address reduces packaging waste from returned or undeliverable goods, which helps logistics companies and retailers to meet corporate sustainability goals.
And finally, with address verification powering a faster, more accurate and environmentally friendly approach to logistics, customer experience and satisfaction levels will be high, encouraging repeat custom and increased revenue.
Address lookup or autocomplete
To deliver accurate address verification, logistics businesses and retailers should consider using an address lookup or autocomplete tool. They provide accurate address data in real-time by delivering a properly formatted, correct address when the user starts to input theirs. Employing such tools reduces the number of keystrokes required, by up to 81 percent, when typing an address. As a result, the entire onboarding process is speeded up, reducing the probability of the user not completing a purchase. Additionally, logistics businesses can use address verification technology to ensure the accuracy of addresses in batch across existing customer databases.
Address verification is even more important when it comes to international logistics, because each country has its own address format which can cause logistics and fulfilment issues if the address is not correctly standardized and validated. Tools like address lookup can automatically convert international addresses into the correct format.
Additionally, when implemented in batch across existing customer databases, address verification services can identify missing or incorrect address components globally, and correct them, and thereby ensure parcels are accurately labelled for faster, more reliable deliveries.
Similar tools with a global reach are also available to help those in logistics obtain accurate telephone numbers and email addresses of recipients. Having access to correct phone numbers and email addresses is vital for customer communication prior, during and post-delivery, to ensure a seamless fulfilment process.
Obtain global postal operator address data
When sourcing address data make sure it matches data from postal operators, otherwise it’ s not possible to guarantee any address is real, exists or is usable for fulfilment. This is why it’ s important to never use Google Maps or a search engine to check the accuracy of addresses, as they don’ t usually have access to this data.
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