By Barley Laing, the UK managing director at Melissa
Recent announcements from the US on increased tariffs on imports, along with moves towards a possible global trade war, has created uncertainty for many retailers. Particularly those that trade significantly in the US market.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) expects trade in global goods to decline 0.2% since the announcements on tariffs, after originally predicting a 2.7% rise in 2025. They also anticipate trade falling by more than a tenth in North America 2025. Additionally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently announced similar figures highlighting a slowdown in global economic growth.
This is bad news for retailers looking to drive growth, particularly for those with significant sales in the US, as more pressure is put on pricing in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
Provide a positive customer experience
It’s those retailers that have access to and can sell to a wide range of markets who will be best placed to survive and ideally thrive, in both the short and long term.
To effectively drive commercial success in the e-commerce world with so much similarity in the quality and price of products on offer, it’s essential to deliver a positive customer experience. It must be a consistent positive experience globally, otherwise the retailer won’t set themselves apart from the competition.
Obtain accurate customer contact data
At the heart of powering a consistent and standout customer experience worldwide is obtaining accurate customer contact data, particularly address data, at a global level. It’s because customer data is one of the most valuable assets retailers have. Data that is clean, contemporary and verified ensures communications are efficiently delivered to provide a good customer experience. This avoids the expensive and dreaded misdeliveries and ‘return to sender’ scenarios. Additionally, clean data can be effectively analysed to gain valuable customer insight that retailers can use to keep existing customers happy, with personalised communications, so they return and spend more in the long term.
However, a big issue for retailers is data decay. Customer data lacking regular intervention degrades at two per cent each month, meaning around 25% of customer data on databases will become inaccurate over the course of a year, as people move home, get divorced and pass away. Therefore, those who don’t take any action to prevent decay will experience an expensive rise in misdeliveries, along with annoyed customers. A ‘do nothing’ approach will also lead to retailers gathering incorrect insight on their customer base, which could negatively impact on their communications and product range, leading to a poor customer experience and reduced revenue.
To obtain accurate data as part of the customer journey – regardless of where their customer is located globally – retailers should use an address lookup or autocomplete service. These tools automatically reveal a suggested correct version of the address as the customer provides theirs, enabling them to select one that’s not only accurate but easily recognised, and appropriately formatted for their country location. Along with preventing mistakes caused by fat finger syndrome, these services reduce the number of keystrokes required when typing an address by up to 81%. This speeds up checkout and reduces shopping cart abandonment, assisting the delivery of a standout customer journey.
To help deliver strong customer relationship management similar technology can be used to deliver first point of contact verification across email and phone, so these vital contact datasets can also be verified in real-time. Verified and therefore usable multiple contact channels can be critical in forging long term loyalty from customers, and are a great way to inform them of new offers while keeping them engaged with your brand.
To deliver a single customer view (SCV), and aid the delivery of insight which can be used to improve and personalise communications, retailers need to have a ‘single user record’. To achieve this they should consider deduplicating data across their customer databases, particularly as those without data quality initiatives in place experience 10-30% duplicate rates across their customer databases. An advanced fuzzy matching tool to merge and purge records works best.
To identify those who have moved, or are no longer at the address on file, retailers should undertake data cleansing or suppression activity. Along with removing incorrect addresses these services can offer deceased flagging that prevents the delivery of mail and other communications to those who have passed away – causing distress to their friends and relatives – which has both a reputational and monetary cost. Additionally, run the National Change of Address (NCOA) database that’s available in the US and UK, and some other countries, against held customer data, because it highlights those who have moved or passed away. By having quick access to the new addresses of customers who have changed residence helps enable retailers to maintain a consistent positive customer experience while improving operational efficiency.
To cost-effectively collect accurate addresses and wider customer contact data in real-time at the customer onboarding stage, as well as cleaning held data in batch, consider using a software as a service (SaaS) data quality platform. Due to their availability as a SaaS they can be easily accessed and don’t require coding, integration, or training to use. This technology can cleanse and correct names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers in the UK, and also worldwide.
The value of geocoding technology
It’s important to recognise that location and address aren’t always the same thing. For instance, different properties may share an address, such as a plot of land or the street edge of a driveway. This is why geocoding technology, that provides latitude and longitude (rooftop level) coordinates, is so valuable in ensuring the fast and accurate delivery of products, and therefore a standout customer experience. This is important when according to research by Ipsos 85% of online shoppers said a poor delivery experience would prevent them from ordering from that retailer again. At the same time it improves retailers’ efforts in sustainability, with the quickest routes for delivery rounds from distribution points identified.
For those operating globally geocoding is particularly important to speeding up customer fulfilment due to different conventions for address formats around the world. For example, the UK uses city, street and house number, but in Japan buildings are referenced by the number of the block they belong to, and within each block buildings are numbered as well. Sometimes it’s done by order of construction, so the numbers don’t necessarily follow each other.
In summary
In this age of global economic uncertainty, and an increasingly challenging trading environment with the US, retailers need to maximise the opportunity to sell their products and services to a worldwide audience to drive growth. To do this effectively they need to be delivering a consistent and positive global customer experience online. This is powered by having access to clean, accurate and verified customer contact data internationally, as well as using geocoding technology.
For more information about Melissa and how our data quality and identity verification services can help you, please visit: www.melissa.com/uk, email: info.uk@melissadata.com or call: 020 7718 0070.
