COMMON LANGUAGE®
Address Analysis System
(LocateIt® System):
Product Solutions

Here are just a few of the ways in which the LocateIt System can help your company:



Clean Up Your Address Database
Kate's address database is used by many other departments in her organization. Over the last 15 years, she has assembled this list from addresses received from customer call-ins to her Customer Support department.

Originally, the database was used only in her department but, without any special planning, other departments, including Billing, Shipping, and Maintenance, began to use her addresses. Today, Kate's list is quite large and is continuously receiving new addresses.

As part of a company-wide, cost-cutting program, Kate is part of a team that has been formed to find ways to improve efficiency within each of the departments. From informal conversations, Kate knows that some of the other departments' problems, such as undeliverable orders, late maintenance calls, and incorrectly billed sales tax are a result of some incomplete and inaccurate addresses in her list.

To improve the quality of her address database, and to add information which will make it better for the other departments, Kate has decided to send it, as a file, to the LocateIt System to analyze in batch mode. She knows that the LocateIt System will provide the current city, state, and ZIP for each address, correct incomplete street names, and correct names which have changed.

Once this is completed, she will have any new addresses, which are added to her list, checked by the LocateIt System. This will be done through an API to her system that the LocateIt System will have developed specifically to meet her unique needs.

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 		Losing sleep over your address data problems?

Minimize Billing Errors
To compute the sales tax on purchases, Joe's billing department uses the addresses from the letterheads of Purchase Orders, and from the completed Business Reply mailings of his customers. With everyone watching where each penny goes these days, his company has been receiving more and more customer complaints about their sales tax being applied incorrectly.

One of the members of the small group that Joe formed to analyze this problem, noted that the town in her mailing address was not where she lived. She actually lived in a small suburb, but the United States Postal Service used the larger neighboring town's name for mail delivery.

By looking closely at road maps, the group also found that in some cases, the company had placed towns in the wrong county. Even though these were towns that were close to the county border, they were still listed in the wrong county.

The group decided to use the LocateIt System, which provides the town or city name in which each residence and business address is physically located, not its mailing address. While identifying if the address is, or is not within the city limits, the LocateIt System also identifies the county for that address.

The group also opted to have the LocateIt System clean up their existing database by a batch file analysis. Because their daily volume of new addresses is small, they chose to use a dial-up modem connection to the LocateIt System that will allow them to check each new address for this information as it is received.

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 		Wasting money investigating customer tax billing errors that could have been avoided?

Consolidate Key Information
Sue just completed a Cause Analysis of why her company lost several major customers to its competition. The analysis indicated that the competition was able to underprice her company on distance-based services. The analysis further showed that her company's distance calculations between the customer and the serving node were incorrect.

To ensure that her company is charging the lowest price for specific services to its customers, Sue's department is now assuming the responsibility of verifying the distance between a serving switch and a customer's location. This means getting the correct V & H (Vertical and Horizontal) and Latitude / Longitude coordinates for all the customer locations in her department's database.

Sue contacted several departments in her company, but none of them were able to provide her with the information that she needed. One department could only give her the coordinates of each switch, while another could only provide the coordinates of a subset of her customers' location. And, even if she had both sets of coordinates, no department was able to give her an accurate distance measurement between the two. Finally, not one of the departments would vouch for the validity of their data.

In her search for a solution, a co-worker told Sue that the LocateIt System could not only provide the coordinate information for all addressed and non-addressed locations, but also could accurately calculate the distance between switches and customer locations. Once the database has been verified and corrected, Sue can use the LocateIt System on an ongoing basis to ensure continued accuracy.

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 		Incorrectly charging customers because you don't have the distance information you need?

Stretch Valuable Resources
To reduce costs, Scott's Service Delivery department was downsized. Delivery and installation routes for several states are now assigned from one location. With the downsizing, the department also lost most of the individuals who had years of familiarity with the delivery assignment areas.

As a result, the frequency of late or missed delivery/installations grew. The poor performance was a result of the newer personnel not recognizing the local street names. Also, the town names of many assignments were given using local area names that did not appear on most maps.

To raise customer satisfaction, Scott now uses the LocateIt System to find each of the different names a street may be known by as it passes through town after town. The LocateIt System will also relate certain area names to their municipality.

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 		Losing customers and money because you are missing your service delivery objectives?

Create Direct-mail Lists That Work
Tammi's company was losing business to new competitors that were coming into the area. When she talked to her ex-customers, they indicated that they were not aware that her company could offer the same services as the competitor. Tammi decided to send a mailing to certain sections within her company's service area that would market a number of the same services her new competitors offered.

She used the Locateit System to find the location of the wire centers which serve each of these areas. Using that location as the center, she had the LocateIt System list all of the addresses within five miles of each of these wire centers. Tammi then completed the mailing by using the complete addresses supplied by the LocateIt System. She was very pleased with the customer response to the new services offering, and gained new customers.

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 		Losing business to competition in your service area?