Address cleansing is one of the main pillars of our data cleansing services, enabling you to take advantage of valuable Royal Mail discounts when sending out mailings and helping you find customers faster in your database by ensuring all their address details are in the right place. But how does it work, and how to you make best use of it?
Postcode Address File (PAF)
PAF is the ultimate reference of addresses in the UK. Maintained by Royal Mail, it contains the full details of every address they deliver to across the country. In order to clean the addresses in your data, we first have to fuzzily match them against PAF to find the right address, then we can take the corrected version of the address from the PAF file.
Cherished address details
Many people like to refer to their addresses in a different way to how Royal Mail recognises them. For example, all areas of London are known simply as London, not the Chelsea, Kensington etc that people in those areas will typically give their addresses as. A lot of people also give additional information at the "top" of their address, e.g. a flat number or house name that may not be recognised by PAF.
We will typically try to preserve any additional information supplied at the top of an address, as it can be vital to help the postman deliver items to the right letter box. We normally discard any alternative town information, but you can select to preserve this if required.
Corrections
Because we use advanced fuzzy matching logic to identify the correct address on PAF based on the information provided in your data, we can make lots of different types of corrections. This isn't a full list, but some of the more common changes we can make are:
- correcting invalid postcodes
- adding a building number in place of an alternative house name
- correcting spellings of towns, streets etc
- adding correct town where only a suburb was supplied
- standardising case and punctuation
We include an additional column in the cleansed data to indicate whether the address was already correct (OK_Unchanged), or whether we made alterations to it in order to make it correct (OK_Corrected). Note that we don't count some minor alterations, e.g. changing case or punctuation, as a correction.
Matching levels
It may sometimes be possible to match part of an address to PAF, but not enough to identify a full address. In these cases we will include a value in our additional column to indicate how much of the address we were able to validate. The values we can give for these records are:
- NOK_NoMatch - we couldn't match any of the address to PAF
- NOK_Town - we could match the town name to PAF, but nothing beyond that
- NOK_Street - we could identify the correct town and street, but not a specific building
- NOK_Building - we could identify a particular building, but the building contains multiple delivery points (e.g. flats) and we couldn't identify which one
If you get a NOK_Street flag for what appears to be a valid address, e.g. "12 High Street, London, SE3 2AS", this normally means that the building number in your address does not exist on PAF. It may be that there is a 12a and 12b on PAF, but not a 12.
Formatting
We understand that every system is different and you need to have control over how your addresses are formatted after cleansing. You might have four fields in one system for addresses while another has five, but requires the town and county to be in the last two fields. You can stay in control of all these settings with the options presented during the purchasing process.
Our formatting options provide a simple way to perform address standardisation when moving data between systems. Even if your addresses do not require any correction, the address cleansing service will still re-format the address to your specifications ready for you to load into your new system.
Identifying individual address elements
You may have a need for identifying individual elements within the address, e.g. street name or building name. We give you the "Output Address Elements" option during the download process to include separate fields for each part of the address to allow you to identify this information more easily, along with the standard formatted version of the address.
Avoiding the problem
Address details do change over time as Royal Mail changes postcodes and other details, but you can avoid the majority of address quality problems by using postcode software to ensure addresses are fully accurate as they are entered.