The Importance Of Accurate Address Data During The Holiday Season

It’s that time of year again. Christmas is right around the corner, Black Friday and Cyber Monday has come and gone, and we have once again seen a record numbers of online purchases being made across the country.

As Christmas fast approaches, businesses are preparing themselves for the wave of orders that make their way to their websites and online stores, and just like how Santa Claus relies on accurate addresses to deliver gifts, businesses rely on clean data to ensure smooth operations and profit during the holiday season.

Pitfalls Of Bad Data

For successful organisations, clean data should be on the top of your Christmas wishlist, especially this time of the year. Having bad data leads to bad business, we know this, but what exactly is meant by bad data?

It is any information a business holds that is either inaccurate, inconsistent or incomplete. For example:

Having a customers first name, but not surname
Incorrectly spelling an address or name
Duplicating the information you have, leading to confusion and wasted storage
Outdated information, such as a persons previous address
Presenting the same data in different ways such as S. Claus instead of Santa Claus.

Bad data leads to misplaced deliveries, missed marketing and sales opportunities, poor customer engagement, and the risk of breaching legal data accuracy requirements.

When businesses neglect to care for the quality of their data and carry on without doing regular data audits they can face fines, waste resources, create unhappy customers or lose revenue.

Accurate address data plays a critical role for businesses, especially during the busy shopping seasons, where people rely on businesses to store correct data so they can fulfil orders and make online purchases. It is predicted that 1.29bn parcels will be delivered in the UK during the festive season this year, an increase of 10.9% compared to last year. Sounds like Santa will have his work cut out for him this year!

The Hopewiser Difference

Hopewiser helps businesses optimise their data and are a provider of accurate global Address Validation and Data Cleansing services, suitable for organisations of any size and purpose.

Data Cleansing identifies and corrects inconsistent, inaccurate and duplicated data, and improves it for better business decision-making and customer communication. The service utilises extensive in-house knowledge, the latest technology and third-party data sources to ensure data hygiene.

But don’t just take our word for it, browse our case studies to discover how we have helped businesses make the most of their data. From Logistics, to Sport clubs, we’ve collaborated with various organisations to ensure their data is fit for purpose.

A staggering 47 million people across the UK have had a parcel delivered to the wrong address. This is mainly down to errors in the checkout stage of an order. When purchasing an item, customers sometimes enter their address incorrectly or leave out details like property numbers or street name due to either typos or complicated address forms. Theses mistakes, although minor, can be the difference between an efficient delivery and happy customers, to wasted resources and damaged business reputation.

Hopewiser’s Address Validation software helps businesses capture, validate and standardise address data to improve customer satisfaction and streamline the address entry process.

From marketing outreach to delivery logistics, accurate address data has a direct impact on business decisions, and with Address Validation you can enhance operational efficiency, prevent costly errors and reduce delivery delays.

Click here to see why businesses integrate our Address Validation software and Access a FREE demo of our Address AutoComplete Lookup software in action! It is the perfect integration tool for your online platform as it simplifies checkout and improves online sales thanks to simple and effective address entry capabilities.

What You Can Do For Your Data

To boost the efficiency of Rudolph and the rest of his reindeer crew, Santa has been known to provide them with treats and magic, but the motivation of delivering presents to children around the world is enough to give them extra speed and agility. Here’s what businesses can do to boost the quality of their data this Christmas and help Santa find the right address, every time.

Implement policies and procedures for managing data across your organisation. For example, define roles and responsibilities to help ensure compliance with data quality standards.
Conduct a data audit from Hopewiser where data is reviewed to identify errors and maintain reliable data that is fit for purpose.
Standardise all data formats to ensure consistency at the point of entry and check things like format and spelling to facilitate easier analysis and data sharing across all systems in an organisation.
Ensure data sources that you use are reliable and accurate by checking its reputation, and cross-checking any information you use.
Train employees on data management and data entry best practices, and educate them about the importance of maintaining data accuracy.
Implement a contingency plan and recovery processes in case data is lost or corrupted.
Improve data security by limiting access to databases, allowing only those with the appropriate authority to access it.

By following these best practices, businesses can significantly improve their data quality, leading to better decision-making and enhanced operational efficiency.