±±¾©Èü³µpk10

Only a few years ago, the idea of keying your house number and postcode into a form on the internet and having the rest of your address details filled in for you seemed little short of revolutionary. Such is the pace of technological change, however, that this computer wizardry is now taken for granted. "What was once a staggering technical feat is now casually referenced by bigger applications," says Chris Duncan, the managing director of data bureau Alchemetrics.

So as more companies become involved in address management, and the business becomes increasingly commoditised, what does the future hold for the sector and what scope is there for further innovation?

The companies at the centre of the address management business - those that write the software - can hardly be accused of standing still. Leanne Douglas, the group product manager at EuroDirect, which provides address management through its RollCall Enhance tool, says today's solutions do much more than simply manage addresses. "They look at the name element as well as the address, confirming, cleaning and updating the name against the edited Electoral Roll and wider consumer universes," Douglas explains. "In the same data processing cycle, they also help remove goneaways, the deceased, MPS/TPS suppressions and other 'do not mails' or internal suppression files. Some more advanced systems even use credit data to screen out those with a credit profile that does not fit your offer."

David Green, business development director of GB Group's data integrity division, says the market has evolved almost beyond recognition. "When we started out in address management, an address would be used almost exclusively to register a customer in a call centre," he reveals. "Today, an address is used for lots of reasons: to send mail, confirm a customer's identity, establish a customer's credit worthiness and for segmentation. All this means the value of an address has become much more important."

Green also points to growth in "sectorised" address management applications. Examples of this include GB Accelerator IQ, which enables a company to search back through the past 10 years of postal and Electoral Roll information to trace individuals using criteria such as debt recovery.

Fraud prevention is another area where address management software is finding a role. Eighteen months ago, GB Group launched URU (You Are You) in partnership with BT. The product enables call centre agents or website operators to confirm the identities of people applying for services such as loans or online gambling.

It does this by checking the details provided against reference datasets such as registers of deceased people, postcodes, telephone numbers and information relating to credit.

Impressive as these services are, do they represent address management in its purest sense? If anything, the development of address management tools seems to be taking them wider, rather than deeper.

Green believes this is what clients want. "When we ask customers what they want from address management, they say they want greater access to more data," he says. "So, in addition to the address, they want names, telephone numbers, suppression files and the ability to get them in a more efficient manner."

One-stop-shop service

It is a similar story at address management company Capscan, which has partnered with Ebiquita to add online verification and suppression to its pure address management offering. David Mead, the sales director, says it is important to offer a one-stop-shop service. "The only way you can do that is by working with other partners," he says. "When you capture the address, you should not need to go through three or four different processes to confirm the name, check the phone number and check if it is listed on any suppression files."

Clearly, this blurring of the lines between address management, suppression and data enhancement had a lot to do with Experian's purchase of the address management company QAS last October. Industry observers view the acquisition as a logical progression for Experian's strategy of reversing its data assets into applications.

Stuart Johnston, the director of sales at QAS, says the address management business is adapting through evolution rather than revolution. "There is no magic formula and no one product that will change the industry," he says. "It's more about broadening the scope of what we do, enriching products with additional data. Customers are looking to be able to make more intelligent use of their data. To be able to do that, it has to be accurate, so anything we can furnish them with - in addition to our core business of getting the name and address right - is going to assist them in that process."

Yet despite the evident desire among address management providers to broaden the scope of their service, some of the users of these tools feel more work is needed on the basic product. Tony Sweetman, data quality director at EHS Brann, has tried a number of address management solutions and believes there are shortcomings that could easily be overcome.

In particular, he cites examples where the address in question has a valid postcode but contains a random error somewhere else.

Take a street name, for example, Springfield Avenue. If this is entered on a database as Sprinfield Avenue (missing the 'g'), Srpingfield Avenue (with the 'r' and the 'p' transposed) or as Sprpingfield Avenue (with an additional 'p' inserted erroneously), some address management tools will fail to validate the address against Royal Mail's Postcode Access File (PAF) and will reject it outright.

This will happen regardless of whether the address has a valid postcode or belongs to known customer.

This problem occurs, Sweetman says, because the phonetics-driven Soundex algorithms used in many address management tools are designed only to standardise poor spelling and then create "lookup keys". They do not tackle the more complex problem of tolerating random errors caused by poor typing or illegible handwriting.

Sweetman says address management companies do not want to use a more exhaustive algorithm for the whole process because it would be far too slow. "My point is, however, that before rejecting an unmatched address with a valid postcode, it would be feasible to use a more sophisticated algorithm capable of tolerating random errors without slowing the process down. It would only be attempting to validate against an average of 15 addresses, usually all on the same street," he says.

Sweetman says he has discussed this and other "blind spots" with address management companies but while some bugs have been fixed, others, such as the one above, have not.

Other end users are calling for improvements. Mike Kilby, data controller at NCH Marketing Services, says his company frequently receives dirty, unformatted, third party, consumer and business-to-business data. "And while we get good results in cleaning, few tools return data to us in a format that is immediately useable," he says. "All tools allow you to output the standard PAF formatted data in 10 or more fields, as well as an unformatted address label of X lines, but few seem to output a formatted address to be held within a database."

This means data processors such as NCH face a choice. They can output the address PAF-style, where every element of the address has a field of its own so that the house number is on one line and the street name on the next. Alternatively, they can output the address in a more conventional-looking manner, with the house number and street name on the same line, and the town, county and postcode following on successive lines.

This second option may seem preferable for mailing purposes but is impractical for storing the address on a database for future analysis because the postcode is no longer where the database would expect to find it.

Appropriate solutions

"What it means in practice is that we have to write business rules that look at each address, at the length of the data there and join the fields together in the most appropriate way" says Kilby. "But it doesn't always work."

So while address management companies are undoubtedly keen to spread their wings a little, clearly they cannot afford to forget the basics.

Matthew Furneaux, head of sales and marketing at address management company Global Address, says it is crucial that data quality specialists continue to develop address management software and services.

"If you consider that, in one single day in the UK, 18,000 people move home, 1,600 die, 820 marry and 410 divorce, you can see that customers could be left by the wayside without stringent management," he says. "With suggestions that DM marketers are wasting £195m in postage costs by sending out wrongly addressed international mail, improvements are needed somewhere along the line."

CASE STUDY: TRAVELODGE

Hotel operator Travelodge has a call centre in Dudley, West Midlands, that takes 32,000 bookings a week. Each week, another 13,000 reservations are made on the company's website and 5,000 people book rooms directly at the hotels' front desks.

Until recently, however, Travelodge had no consistent, standardised way of capturing customers' address details across these various touchpoints.

It asked GB Group to devise a system to standardise its address capture process and also speed up the process in the call centre, so agents could handle more calls.

GB Group developed a solution based on its GB Accelerator software suite, which is designed to capture customers' names, addresses and related data rapidly and accurately at different customer touch points across a business.

The software uses the resources of GB Group's National Register database. This combines and cross-references the Electoral Roll and Royal Mail's Postcode Access File, which contains 27 million addresses and 1.7 million postcodes in the UK. It also holds a range of geo-demographic data on households, businesses and individuals.

Since the solution was deployed, call handling times have been reduced by five seconds on average, and Travelodge estimates online booking times could be reduced by 80 per cent.

"The system ensures information given by customers online and at the front desks of hotels is captured precisely and in a consistent format," says Ian Davidson, managing director of GB Group's data integrity division.

"This helps the business to secure reliable data for billing, deliveries, profiling and any subsequent marketing activity."

PAF-MATCHING ADDRESS MANAGEMENT PRODUCTS Supplier: AFD Software Products: Postcode 2000 range Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier Capscan Products: Matchcode range, Sortcode, Zapcode range Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: Data Discoveries Product: Data Discovery Data type: B2C and B2C Supplier: Education Direct Product: Spirit Data type: B2B Supplier: EuroDirect Product: RollCall Enhance Data type: B2C Supplier: GB Group Product: GB Accelerator Data type: B2B and B2C Supplier: Global Address Product: Global Address Datastore Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: Hopewiser Product: Atlas Suite Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: IequalsP Product: Cygnus Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: LM Software Product: Address Manager Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: Pitney Bowes Product: AddressRight(TM) Pro Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: Postcode Anywhere Product Postcode Anywhere Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: QAS, an Experian company Product: QuickAddress DataWorld Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: SAS Product: SAS Data Quality Solution Data type: B2C and B2B Supplier: helpIT systems Product: The matchIT suite Data type: B2C and B2B Source: Software Guide, Direct Response, September 2004