By Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa
Traditionally, geocoding technology has been vital for the logistics and delivery sectors. It’s because geocoding takes a verified postal address and enriches it by appending rooftop latitude and longitude location coordinates to deliver an accurate ‘rooftop level’ address location. It’s particularly important because location and address aren’t necessarily the same thing. Therefore, having access to precise geo-coordinates enhances the ability of any fulfilment or last mile delivery agents in performing their roles.
By using geocoding technology those in logistics and delivery can reduce their shipping costs, speed up and reduce the cost of fulfilment by optimising delivery routes, while avoiding costly – in monetary and customer experience terms – return to sender issues.
Returns and redeliveries are particularly big issues for those operating globally, with cross border trade and deliveries to other territories resulting in even higher costs for fulfilment should the delivery go wrong.
Additionally, more efficient delivery routes and accurate fulfilment first time means geocoding has big benefits for organisations looking to reduce their carbon emissions and meet their sustainability targets.
Sector-wide benefits of geocoding technology
Geocoding technology has much more it can deliver beyond the logistics and delivery sector. For instance, it can aid an organisation’s sales and marketing efforts, such as via sales clustering through the analytics opportunities it provides. Geocoding can map the location of customers and like-minded prospects in specific geographic areas. Targeted communications can then be distributed based on similar sites where there has been identifiable interest in your product and service. Geolocation informed offers can also be delivered, whether based on the customer’s location, nearest outlet or distribution point to them.
With geocoding technology you can easily map locations using geospatial visualisation. This is useful for planning for things such as store networks, event locations, or even risk exposure – like the likelihood of properties flooding – which is important for the insurance sector, for example.
Geocoding data can be used to gain deeper insights on your customers – a better understanding of your demographic – and therefore aids in the creation of well-informed strategic decisions across various business functions.
Taxes can be different depending on location, such as the State Sales Tax in the USA. An address might be incorrectly provided, causing the wrong sales tax to be attributed, and on top of that you could have the additional cost of return to sender and redelivery to deal with. Latitude and longitude co-ordinates can only apply to a single location, therefore appending geocodes to customer addresses will ensure the correct sales tax is applied.
For the public sector, in particular, geocoding technology helps in the planning of disaster and crisis response planning. Having access to a driving distance calculation ‘street route’ element within the geocoding technology is essential here, to provide drive times to destinations, with the shortest distance provided. Also, it’s possible to effectively determine geolocations for ‘off road’ properties that cannot be reached by vehicle.
How to deliver effective geocoding
For geocoding technology to work successfully it needs access to clean address data. For peace of mind source a geocoding technology with advanced address parsing and matching algorithms built in, which can correct spelling errors and complete addresses with missing or invalid components, to deliver even more precise results. These should have access to global data from multiple sources, including address databases, spatial data, street maps and navigational data, and census data to ensure they deliver the most precise coordinates.
Another option is to obtain industry leading data cleansing, standardisation and verification technology with a global reach to clean your customer database. Such tools can provide data quality in batch and in real-time at the customer onboarding stage. Technology like a scalable data cleaning software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and an address autocomplete or lookup service respectively work well. In some cases geocoding is available as part of an address autocomplete or lookup tool.
A particular benefit of address autocomplete is that it can provide accurate, properly formatted address data in real-time, while reducing the number of keystrokes required by up to 81 per cent when typing an address. This results in the entire onboarding and sales process being speeded up, reducing the probability of the consumer not completing a purchase, for example.
Ensuring your databases are optimised with verified address data for geocoding is a vital step to reap the wide range of benefits it offers in supporting revenue generation, efficiency savings and in meeting sustainability targets, as we edge closer to 2025.
Jesse Pitts has been with the Global Banking & Finance Review since 2016, serving in various capacities, including Graphic Designer, Content Publisher, and Editorial Assistant. As the sole graphic designer for the company, Jesse plays a crucial role in shaping the visual identity of Global Banking & Finance Review. Additionally, Jesse manages the publishing of content across multiple platforms, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune.