Our order systems look up delivery addresses from the national postcode file, which we license and load into a lookup service. A customer types a postcode, picks a house from the list, and the address arrives in the order already formatted the way the carriers expect.
In the spring customer services began reporting more failed deliveries to new build estates. When we checked, the addresses were not in our lookup. Our licence entitles us to monthly updates. We had been loading them once a year, in January, because the load had been set up as an annual task by a contractor in 2019 and nobody had ever questioned the schedule. A family moving into a new house in February could not be found by our systems until the following January.
The agents found a way round it, as people do. When the lookup failed they typed the address by hand into the free text fields. Those addresses bypassed every validation we have: no standard formatting, no check that the street matched the postcode, and no delivery point reference, which one of our carriers uses to route parcels. Over the previous year about six thousand four hundred orders had gone out with manually typed addresses. Their failed delivery rate was roughly five times that of looked up addresses, and each failed delivery costs us a redelivery charge and, often, a customer.
Reference data looks like the most stable data we hold. Postcodes, countries, currencies and tax rates feel as if they were settled long ago. In practice some of them change every month, and a copy of reference data is a snapshot that ages from the day it is loaded.
The postcode file now loads monthly, within a week of release, and the load is monitored like any other job. Any address entered by hand is flagged on the order and checked against the next monthly file, so it gains its proper reference once the address appears. Agents see a message explaining that a new build may be too recent for the lookup, and the order is routed to a carrier service that tolerates it.
The data we buy from somebody else still has an age, and the age is decided by our load schedule, not by the supplier.
– Serguey Shinder
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