Is Poor Data Quality Costing You Money?

According to the U.S. Postal Service, undeliverable as addressed (UAA) mail costs the Postal Service about $1.5 billion a year, and the mailing industry $20 billion. But the costs of inaccurate addresses are far greater. For example, a lost invoice impacts cash flow, and UAA direct mail leads to lost marketing opportunities. 

The culprit of UAA can usually be found in faulty databases due to a variety of reasons, including data entry mistakes by employees, errors made by customers when filling in physical or online forms, data imports of unverified records from external sources, and people and businesses changing address. No matter the reason, the loss can be staggering:

Wasted time and money

• More postage, paper and envelopes
• Duplicate printing and handling
• Re-mailing or -shipping
• Addresses correction fees
• Fines on discounted mailings
• Late or unpaid invoices
• Late fee disputes with customers
• Missed or late deliveries to customers

Below is a sample illustration of the cost of returned mail due to bad address quality...

What You Can Do Today To Reduce or Eliminate UAA

• Quantify your organization’s volume of returned mail and packages
• Assess the types of critical business correspondence impacted by UAA

With this information in hand, you can talk to key internal stakeholders about the importance of address verification software to improve the address quality of your documents, including amending or removing data that is incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated. This helps ensure that you send the right information to the right person.

Check out Quadient’s Satori Infuse Desktop solution to help you control the accuracy of your data and improve your customer communications.