More than 23% of addresses contain some sort of error, says Cynthia Williams, director of product marketing for Pitney Bowes Business Insight. Organizations that implement end-to-end solutions will not only save money, but reinforce customer loyalty
DMNews: Isn’t correcting addresses merely a matter of postal compliance?
Cynthia Williams: Postal penalties for bad addresses and returned mail are high. But when organizations only deal with data quality as part of postal compliance — correcting envelopes instead of addresses — the problems only intensify. Quality deteriorates further with postal change and customer moves. What’s needed is an end-to-end solution that reaches across the entire enterprise to make sure addresses throughout the organization are correct rather than dealing with these in isolation.
DMNews: What are the implications for poor address quality?
Williams: The cost of incorrect and incomplete addresses is high, including postage penalties, redundant efforts, missed sales, and customer dissatisfaction. Late or misdirected mail can increase inbound customer service calls – by up to 30%. Improving address quality can contain those costs while also decreasing a company’s risk in terms of collections, applying correct local tax rates, and speeding new orders, to name a few benefits.
DMNews: What is enterprise address management and why are businesses adopting the solution?
Williams: Address quality, data quality, is a big issue today. Many companies have multiple databases and sources today, so correcting the envelope doesn’t work. What’s been happening is someone changes an address at the end of mail processing and that bad address never gets corrected in a central database. This means that other groups within the organization who also have that bad address in their databases may or may not catch the error independently. The mailing department for marketing, for example, will use that list for direct marketing or the billing department will send out statements — none of them knowing that someone else in the organization identified and corrected the error long ago. Enterprise address management closes the loop on that problem.
DMNews: What kind of cost savings are companies realizing by using enterprise address management?
Williams: The savings are significant. I’ll give you a couple of examples. One entertainment client of ours is expected to achieve a one-year savings of more than $1.6 million based solely on postage and processing costs alone. Another client of ours is expected to save nearly $700,000 across their enterprise, from mail production costs, office overhead costs and financial services costs. See why I say there’s value in a good address?
Pitney Bowes just released a new whitepaper that provides insights on what Enterprise Address Management can mean for organizations. Click here to download this free paper.
