Ecommerce customer satisfaction

No matter how technologically reliant the world becomes, Britain will always need post.

According to figures from the Office for National Statistic, online stores now account for 13.2% of all retail sales. With more and more shoppers choosing to buy online, E-Commerce sites have to rely on postal services to ship their goods, meaning that your customer satisfaction is in the hands of the postman.

Unfortunately, as the Royal Mail say on their own website, “sometimes things go wrong”.

Royal Mail doesn’t guarantee delivery of items; they lose thousands of letters and parcels every week. The organization claimed 2012 that they receive one complaint per 13,000 items of mail on average. With 15.9 BILLION pieces of mail delivered each year in Britain, we are left with over a million dissatisfied British customers annually.

In Royal Mail’s defense, they perform a thankless task. There is a myriad of things that may go wrong, chief among them being incorrect addresses. Addresses can be complicated things to jot down at times, and the likelihood of a mistake either in writing or reading complicated addresses is high.

For E-Commerce businesses in particular, this can be a problem. Businesses are often required to pay for lost items, as well as the embarrassment that this causes. All it takes is one item to be labelled incorrectly for customers to be lost.

One way to minimize this is by using an address lookup service such as Postcodes4U.  Postcodes4U uses Postcode Address File (PAF®) from the Royal Mail, meaning they use the most up-to-date and complete address database in the UK containing over 28 million addresses.

For respectable e-commerce sites, a postcode address lookup is a handy customer service tool. Not only does it minimize time spent filling out address forms, it also assures the customer that their address will be recorded and sent out in a trusted, official format.