History - a case study

Canada Post introduced the Address Accuracy Program in 1992. The purpose of the program was to increase the proportion of mail which could be processed and sorted mechanically by CPC. In return for increased mechanization, CPC customers receive incentive rates on their postage. The Toronto Sun was affected by this program at that time, since it owned The Financial Post newspaper. This paper was available across Canada outside of major metropolitan areas through a weekend edition subscription. In order to continue to access CPC incentive rates, we had to comply with the new address accuracy requirements.

This led to several important decisions:

1. Since this was a new program, no commercial software was available and we decided to develop our own application and become CPC recognized. This occurred in 1993 and we have been a SERP recognized vendor ever since then.
2. We recognized that the correct place to perform address validation is at data entry time. This meant integrating it with existing applications such as order-entry (circulation systems for us). Important design / architecture decisions were made at that time to allow us develop the application as a set of modules, designed to be integrated with other applications. This meant a software toolkit or API with a simple argument list. Today our databases maintained with StreetPerfect are over 97% accurate and they remain there without any additional processing required. All addresses are validated at entry time using the functionality that we developed.

Several benefits came about as a result of the on-line validation capabilities:

1. Access to CPC incentive rates, saving considerable postage.
2. Reduction in return mail, again saving postage and increasing customer satisfaction.
3. More timely and accurate product delivery - critical considering the short shelf life of a newspaper. Invoicing could also benefit here, reducing outstanding receivable days.
4. Improvement in order entry accuracy, reduction in call times, reduction in staffing requirements and increased customer satisfaction.
5. For e-commerce websites benefits include reduced cart abandonment, faster customer checkout and improved customer satisfaction.
6. For last mile delivery service providers, improved address accuracy results in more efficient routing, reduced delivery times and increased productivity.