DM p22-28 addressing Feb09.qxp 29/01/2009 11:24 Page 28
Addressing
Salesforce.com works for Clark & Taylor
As a business consultancy dedicated to helping its clients address is absolutely imperative. Housing associations are
gain a competitive advantage with the use of technology, subject to Housing Corporation Assessment (HCA) which ulti-
Kent-based Clark & Taylo offer services including customer mately determines eligibility for further public investment and
relationship management, process management, intelligent therefore the minimisation of costs is essential to their oper-
business and coaching and mentoring ational viability.
Managing director Justin Halfpenny needed an addressing “From our perspective the agility of the web-based
solution for a client that would populate a CRM of 35,000 approach and the pay-per-click payment model of the plug-in
addresses, all housing association tenants spread throughout allows us to scale our costs, giving us great flexibility,” he
the UK. says.
He explains: “Our client was responsible for the mainte- “The service also lets our client capture clean address data
nance and repair of all the properties contained within the for administration purposes and has automatically cleansed
CRM, and needed to get their 15 field personnel to respond their data base and alleviated the problem of duplicated ten-
to tenant’s telephone requests for service calls as quickly as ant records, saving them money by considerably reducing the
possible – no mean feat. level of undelivered mail.
“We decided to use
Salesforce.com, in conjunction with “Housing associations have to hit strict ‘Key Performance
Postcode Anywhere’s international addressing plug-in. Indicators’ and are audited on their repair response times –
Postcode Anywhere’s addressing application took minutes to so it’s critical for them to respond immediately to tenant call
deploy through the
Salesforce.com platform and integrated out requests and that they are directed to the correct proper-
easily with the client’s legacy system. Our client seems to be ty.”
really happy with the service.” In Halfpenny’s opinion, data integrity was key to the suc-
According to Halfpenny, abortive service calls cost his cess of this particular project, and to be able to use the CRM
client considerable money and frustrated their tenants. As with customised postcode validation easily and cost-effec-
the engineers work on a 2-4 hour response time for emergen- tively has made this a very successful and manageable client
cies, being able to direct service engineers to the correct project for him and his business.
with a desktop application you would hardly know ing its data, might mean ceding some of their owner-
whether the facility was being used ten times or ten ship and intellectual property rights. “That is quite
thousand times over the course of the year. You worrying,” Dorricott says. “Under the new proposals,
would pay the reseller for the user license, but would if you have captured your database using the PAF you
not know the value you were getting. With transac- might find Royal Mail wants to charge another
tional licensing it is far more transparent. You can see license fee when you sell to someone else. That could
exactly what you have used and how much you are be entirely counterproductive: companies in that situ-
paying for it.” Inevitably with this model there is a ation would avoid the PAF, so as not to risk losing
cut-off point, however. “Once it starts getting too control of their database and having to keep paying
expensive a company may prefer just to hire a stu- royalty fees.”
dent to do manual lookups. That would be counter- Inevitably in this process there will be winners and
productive, as formatting will go awry, and they will losers, and it’s likely that some companies will end
end up with lots of spelling mistakes and inaccura- up paying a bit more, while others pay less. The cru-
cies.” cial thing will be to avoid creating conditions that
There are other potential hazards. Per-user charging discourage any company from using address lookups,
could mean that in some circumstances a firm that while extending usage. In the meantime, the hope is
has paid once for a licence may now have to pay that Royal Mail takes heed of the industry’s concerns
twice. Dorricott thinks that is quite anti-competitive, and does not let the timetable slip any further.
and perhaps even illegal under competition law. “A Dorricott, for one, is more optimistic now about the
business might be running two different sales and prospects than he was six months ago. “In most cases
marketing software package side by side with an HR we are being listened to, and we hope the result will
package on the same computers, each with an address be favourable,” he says.
lookup feature supplied by a different reseller,” he As resellers themselves say, little ever changes in
explains. “The industry has always considered that the world of addressing software, and a new PAF
once it has been paid you don’t need to pay it again, license is a major event. However once the pain of
but in the new world both resellers would have to adjustment is over it could bring new opportunities.
pay, increasing the cost for their client.” “The exciting thing is that in the future we will be
There are also concerns from list brokers that under able to develop innovative new licensing models that
the terms of the proposed agreement, their activities can cover a much wider numbers of users,” Dorricott
in cleaning databases against the PAF, and incorporat- says.
n
28 Database Marketing February 2009
www.dmarket.co.uk
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