Where is my item?

Original article by Sam Webb

We’ve all been there, waiting in all day for that delivery between 8am and 6pm it’s exciting isn’t it! You wait… and wait… and… That excitement is all of a sudden taken over by frustration because your item(s) still haven’t arrived.

I’ve moved house recently so waiting in for deliveries has been a daily occurrence for almost 6 weeks now, I think the most frustrating one was when my broadband installation was delayed because the engineer couldn’t find my address and unfortunately didn’t think to call me to ask me where the house was. Never mind, I’m almost over that now!

Because we work with many e-Commerce retailers, I regularly hear or see customers complaining that they haven’t received their goods on time or the delivery driver can’t locate them, this could be for a number of reasons. One could be that your items haven’t been dispatched from the warehouse on time, another could be that items have gone missing our even stolen but the biggest sole reason is because the courier can’t find the customers address so the goods end up being returned.

There are a number of reasons for this too but the most obvious and common one is that the address wasn’t entered correctly when the customer placed the order to begin with.

Customers not receiving goods on time or even at all is an obvious pain point, but, aside from the financial losses caused by refunds, damages and re-delivery costs, your brand’s reputation could also be at risk. With more businesses providing customer support via social media because it is more cost effective for them also increases the rise of negative comments to be broadcast all over the internet for anyone to see at anytime. I’ve provided some examples below that we have come across and blurred out some parts of obvious reasons.

Validate data at the point of entry / capture

Okay, so sometimes people get things wrong, they miss-type their address, it’s an easy mistake to make and I’m sure most people have done it, however, this can be easily rectified. Data8 have a service called Predictive Address which can be easily implemented in any eCommerce checkout page, CRM or ePos system. This type of technology has three main benefits to online retailers:

• Improvement in Data Quality
• Reduced shopping cart abandonment
• Improved UX and conversion rates

Data 8’s Predictive Address service also includes fuzzy matching which will rectify any typo error or miss-spelling, please see the example below.

“We found that our previous solution was difficult to install, difficult to integrate and there were a number of problems throughout. The addresses given by Data8’s solution were accurate, which meant no more Google-ing, ensuring accuracy and saving on valuable resources.” See our other testimonials here.

Free trial

You can take a free trial of Data 8’s real-time validation services which includes Predictive Address here or alternatively contact one of the validate team on 0151 355 4555.