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Address management used to be so easy. Especially when companies were only interested in collecting customer and prospect data from consumers in their own country, and only had the two primary channels of telephone and post to worry about. This meant that building a customer or prospect database and keeping it clean, accurate and up-to-date was a fairly routine task.

Fast forward a few years and now there are a host of alternative channels - the internet, email, mobile, DRTV. So what issues do these developments present, and what can modern-day address management solutions do to help?

Address format

There are two key issues when it comes to capturing or processing address data from outside the UK. The first is the format of the address, and the second is the availability of a properly coded postal reference file.

Any global, or even multinational, address management solution must be able to cope with widely varying address formats. As Steve May, data consultant at Occam, points out: "If you plan to hold data from many countries, you will need to ensure that your internal database structure can accommodate the many variations of addressing standards. Don't expect all countries to conform to four lines of address plus postal code - you need to think way beyond that."

As Martin Bradbury, international client services director at data owner EuroDirect, notes, the trick is to have a solution that can correctly identify the different formats and recognise which country they are from.

"In the UK, for example, the key elements are the postcode, county, city, and the district within a city," he says. "If they were confused, no software system could work it out. So for an international address, it is a case of knowing which elements are the core ones in deciding where the address is situated, and where those bits reside in the address."

EuroDirect works with address management company Group 1 Software which cleans the address, puts it into the correct fields and then automatically appends CAMEO geodemographic data for 32 countries.

Postal reference files

If you have only ever dealt with UK addresses, it is easy to assume that every country has a postal reference file, such as Royal Mail's PAF (postcode address file). Unfortunately, this is not the case. For many countries there is no commercially available equivalent. Allan McCouig, technical director at DM agency, EHS Brann Discovery, estimates that "there are about 19 well-structured reference files, similar to the PAF, licensed by commercial suppliers. But most countries do not have commercially available PAF files, so you can't trust the results quite so much."

In the UK, it seems, we are blessed with a far more advanced postal system than many other countries, not only in terms of address structure but also in the quality of address data. This makes international addressing more complex than it is in the UK.

"Once you get out of the western hemisphere, into developing countries, the quality of the address data becomes more limited," says David Green, business development director at GB Group. "You have to rely on the local knowledge of the postal delivery people to ensure your package arrives. But countries do develop, and as they improve their economic structure, they do make improvements to their postal system."

Each country also has different rules, so it is key, say experts, to recognise which nation the data comes from and do the best you can with the data from each place.

Where the country in question does not have a PAF-style postal reference file, companies need to "backfill" the address data, with reference to other sources, as Sam Taverner, business development leader at data company Acxiom, explains. "Every time we see an occurrence of a foreign name or address, we store it away so if we see the same person again, we can identify them," he says.

"The science goes around deciding who is the same person, built up by decisions we make based on the reference data we hold. We have hundreds of millions of occurrences of addresses in the database and we use these to carry out intelligent matching," he says.

Luckily there are products available to help. GB Group's GB Accelerator International address management solution has been developed with address management company Global Address and covers 237 countries and territories throughout the world. Acxiom's solution, developed in-house and called Abilitec, uses a variety of sources for the reference data, including Electoral Roll data for the UK, and equivalent files for other countries, where these exist.

Terry Hiles, managing director of address management company Capscan, says the enhanced data tables it uses in Germany raise the coverage from the 35 per cent of the population covered by the Deutsche Post file, to 99.5 per cent of the population.

And Chris Duncan, managing director at data services specialist Alchemetrics, advises companies to pay close attention to these datasets when choosing a solution.

"The key is to look at the data that sits behind the solution, and at how good the matching logic is," says Duncan. "We have evaluated a few over the years and found that, in some cases, there is not much sitting behind them."

Address management company QAS agrees that the reference data is crucial.

The company currently has 19 country datasets, and will be launching three more this year - in Italy, Portugal and Austria. But QAS head of marketing Rebecca Clayton points out: "We only buy and resell address data where we believe it is of sufficient quality. We would be in every country if we thought the data was good enough. But if you take the Italian dataset as an example, we have been looking at it for 12 years and only now are we about to buy it."

Channel management

The issue of collecting data from multiple channels seems to cause less concern for those involved in building and maintaining databases. But how a company's system is set up can make a huge difference to the quality of the data that company ends up with.

"If you are capturing an address online, then it is all about the format of the screen being used to capture the data," says EHS Brann Discovery's McCouig. "If that is well designed and unambiguous then you usually get a better quality address in the first place. For example, you should ask people which country they are from, and then present them with the relevant format for that country."

Capscan's Hiles points out that the software needs to be tolerant in terms of spelling errors, where a character has been mistyped by the consumer, or misheard where the address is being collected by an agent over the phone. But he adds: "These, however, are basic features that you would expect to find in a mature market such as ours."

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the emergence of the newer communications channels is the way they are being forced to interface with the old. Allegran Advertising is an email data supplier with more than one million opted-in email addresses. But managing director Spike Robinson says the company cannot rely on email alone.

"Our larger customers want to use things such as geodemographics to target customers via the web and email in the way they have traditionally done via post - perhaps broadcasting an email campaign into TV regions where a TV campaign is running. It is therefore essential that we have a PAF-validated address available in addition to the email data," says Robinson.

And GB Group's Green says the advent of multichannel communications is creating a need for companies to reassess the way their databases are structured. Customers, says Green, are becoming accustomed to telling companies how they would like them to communicate with them, but this presents a challenge from a database perspective.

"We see organisations holding customer data at a product level, rather than at the single customer view level," says Green. "So a financial services company might have an insurance database, a mortgage database, a credit card database and so on. We encourage customers to hold all this data at customer level, but bringing it together is far from easy."

Perhaps not, although in this multi-channel world in which we now live and transact, it is a challenge that few companies can afford to ignore.

CASE STUDY: GRAPHIC DATA UK

Graphic Data UK provides document management, data capture and business process outsourcing services. It manages 2.5 million credit card applications each year from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, for one international client.

Processing credit card applications can be a lengthy process. Data needs to be checked and verified for validity and stringent data protection rules apply.

In an attempt to speed up the data capture process, the company chose Capscan's Matchcode International address management solution, with additional datasets for each country. Matchcode International includes address management support for 240 countries/territories worldwide, postal codes for all countries with a postal code system, street-level information for more than 40 countries, and enhanced data tables for more than 19 countries.

"Matchcode International has minimised the number of keystrokes the data entry team needs to make (from 50 to about 10) to identify an accurate address," says Andy Boniface, group project manager at Graphic Data UK.

TOP TIPS - Working with data

1. Use an address management solution that can cope with addresses in the different formats used around the world.

2. Look for a solution where additional datasets are used to "backfill" the address data in countries without a good-quality equivalent of the UK's PAF, and satisfy yourself as to the accuracy of these datasets.

3. Build your database around a single customer view rather than maintaining several product-centric databases, each holding details of the customers for each product - as many customers will appear on several databases, often with inconsistent information.

4. Think futureproof. To accommodate the increasing amount of data you want to hold on customers and prospects, with their permission, build in the flexibility to accommodate email addresses, mobile phone numbers and international addresses in the database. It means you have to give each row and each column within the database greater flexibility, but the extra effort and investment is worth it in the long run.