café,
and catering for all types
of events and corporate functions.
Although Rochford is primarily involved in wine production,
it is well known for regularly hosting special events and
concerts, including the annual ‘A Day On The Green’
music event. Through its website and seasonal newsletters,
Rochford sells merchandise and concert tickets, and promotes
competitions and special deals to club members. Rochford
maintains a database of over 31,00 subscribers nationwide
and is planning to distribute an e-newsletter to members
in the near future.
The Challenge
Rochford relies heavily on Australia Post to distribute
newsletters, wine deliveries, special deals brochures and
event tickets to members in a timely fashion. It is therefore
crucial that Rochford’s database is up-to-date and
entries are correctly recorded. Over time, Rochford Wines
realised that manually updating and validating customer
and member addresses was not only extremely time-consuming
but also very unreliable, resulting in high volumes of returned
mail. Frequently, over 10 percent of mail-outs did not reach
the recipient and were either stranded at Australia Post
for long periods of time before being returned or sent to
an incorrect address. This posed a serious problem as significant
quantities of wine and concert tickets were not being delivered
on time. This resulted in a costly and inconvenient experience
for both the company and the customer.
Rochford Wines was also concerned about unprofessional
addressing due to a large number of inconsistencies in punctuation
and grammar. The team had previously tried to use coding
to ensure the correct punctuation was in place and ensure
that only numbers were put into the post code fields but
this was not always successful.
As there were no strict systems in place, staff at Rochford
Wines were required to take on the resource-heavy project
of regularly cleaning up and exporting mail lists to ensure
addresses were recorded in full before being sent to the
printer.
Solution
Rochford Wines was unaware that address management solutions
like those provided by Experian QAS were available until
it was approached by Experian QAS in 2005. Sherree Williams,
IT systems & logistics manager, Rochford Wines, said:
“Once we’d learned about these products, we
researched solutions from a number of companies to find
out which was best for us. We ultimately decided on Experian
QAS, not only because its products had all the functionalities
we needed at a good price, but also because Experian QAS
proved to be far more reliable and accessible than other
vendors…….
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