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Denver Newspaper Agency Gets Papers Routed in the Right Direction with QAS
As you sip coffee and read the paper tomorrow morning, think about the effort it would take to hand-deliver newspapers to 830,000 households every day. When a newspaper delivery company faces such a huge logistical challenge, getting even a small percentage of the addresses in the customer database wrong could spell disaster in the form of customer complaints, wasted carrier hours, and dissatisfied third-party newspaper publishers.
Denver Newspaper Agency publishes The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News. A decade ago, the company adopted a new strategy: as long as its carriers were delivering its papers, why not leverage their effort and have them drop off third-party papers, as well? That decision helped Denver News grow to one of the largest newspaper companies in the country, delivering along with its own papers The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Barron's, The Financial Times, and eight local publications within the state of Colorado.
"Customers don't pay for papers they don't receive"
"People call to get the paper delivered right after they move, or sometimes even before they move," said April Gauldin, Circulation Operations Director at Denver News. "They might not yet know their full address details. Sometimes the realtor has given them incomplete information."
A recent database merger compounded the delivery problems. Until 2001, The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were published by two separate agencies. After a joint operating agreement, the companies merged two disparate customer databases, leading to concerns about address data integrity.
The effects of inaccurate addresses on the bottom line at Denver News were significant:
- New "starts" were not always delivered to the right household;
- If a paper contained an inaccurate address label, it did not generate revenues even though printing and attempts to deliver it cost money;
- After database merges and list rentals, Denver News management had address data integrity problems. For example, one customer might have appeared in both databases but with slight variations in the address format. Determining which was correct was causing headaches in Circulation.
QAS validates addresses
Gauldin and her team adopted QAS Batch, an address cleansing product from QAS, in early 2003 to address questions about the accuracy of existing address data. QAS Batch validates addresses in an existing database against official USPS® records. QAS Batch is CASS Certified™, which helps customers qualify for special postage discounts on bulk mail. Although the operations group had used several cleaning tools within their legacy systems, they found QAS Batch far more user-friendly and effective.
The product immediately identified that many of the addresses were incorrect, duplicated, or incomplete. "It was a major help with the apartment numbers," said Gauldin. "QAS Batch reconciled the address data discrepancies, and made the delivery process much more efficient."
The circulation staff were so impressed with QAS Batch that they adopted QAS Pro, which validates addresses as customer service agents enter them, and QAS Pro Web, which validates addresses that come via the company website.
"Most of our subscriptions come in through the call center," said Gauldin. "Having a product that automatically fills in street names and prompts for apartment numbers makes each call more efficient and pleasant for the customer and also gets perfect addresses into our database from the beginning."
Carriers become more efficient
Denver News has noted a decrease in "papers not started" after implementing QAS software. "Our carriers are reporting that their time on the roads is much more efficient," said Gauldin. "They know exactly which house and which apartment they're delivering to, which means that if they're on the clock, they're helping to generate revenues for the company."
QAS Batch is currently available for Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP. Also available... QAS Pro, an international address management tool for the address capture and accurate verification of addresses, which are held in the postal address files of supported countries, including the United States.
The news is good for Denver Newspaper Agency, which reduced undelivered papers, made the delivery process more efficient, and increased customer satisfaction, thanks to QAS.
