29 October 2008

Virginia Hayward is ensuring customers' gifts arrive for Christmas

Virginia Hayward, one of the largest hamper suppliers in the UK, has selected Experian, the global information services company, to ensure that its customers’ gifts arrive in time for Christmas. The company will use QAS Pro On Demand to validate the delivery addresses for customer orders.

Virginia Hayward sends out a quarter of a million hampers each year and also operates a hamper fulfillment service for a number of household-name retailers, including John Lewis, Sainsbury’s and Selfridges.

Should a customer placing an order give a partial delivery address, the .NET based QAS Pro On Demand software will instantly provide Virginia Hayward with the complete and correctly formatted postal address, validated against Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF).

QAS Pro On Demand is accessed via its Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The scalable and cost-effective contact data management system provides automatic software and data updates, eliminating additional IT expenditure.

Alex Walker, Virginia Hayward’s marketing manager, said: “During peak trading periods, we send out thousands of hampers each day. We also take large orders from corporate customers, where one individual is responsible for up to 300 recipient addresses. There is so much potential for error. If someone enters an ‘SP’ postcode as ‘SL’, it is actually an address at the opposite end of the country.

“To maintain an excellent level of service, QAS Pro On Demand is crucial. It works perfectly. We could not offer the level of service on the scale we do without Experian QAS.”

Stuart Johnston, UK managing director for Experian QAS, added: “Everyone knows that the run up to Christmas is the busiest time in the retail calendar. We work with 1,400 retailers in the UK and they tell us that having to worry about whether deliveries are going to the right address is a major issue. Our new On Demand platform is ideal because it means they can invest in data quality without having to worry about additional IT costs.”

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