Postie minus

Due to the inability of the current postcode system to cope with the growth and geographical spread of delivery points, new postcodes are set to come into effect in June 2006. Although postcodes have been used in New Zealand since 1977, they remain largely unknown to most people. The new four-digit postal codes will streamline the mail process. Accordingly, each postcode will have no more than 10,000 delivery addresses and no duplicate streets.

This change has huge implications for those businesses that undertake large marketing mail outs to their customers. When New Zealand Post rolls out these new codes, customers who use its bulk mail services will have 24 months to update their records. After this period, those still using the old postcodes will not be eligible for their standard bulk mailing discounts. Considering how often many large businesses use bulk mail, these savings are substantial.

To complicate the matter further, New Zealand Post will also be updating its address standards, with changes that concern the layout of customer addresses on envelopes. For example, suburbs are now mandatory when they are of common usage, and the correct town/city must be used (North Shore for a North Shore address instead of Auckland).

For most large companies, reformatting and updating the information on their customer databases to comply with these changes is a mammoth undertaking involving hours of intensive labour and research. Most companies simply do not have the capability or the resources to do this.

This need not be the headache it appears to be according to Jason Satherley of Datamine, whose data quality services are designed to remove the hassle involved in dealing with the changes New Zealand Post is implementing. As a New Zealand Post partner, Datamine has access to the new postcodes, enabling it to append a company's data without disrupting business. In addition, Datamine can clean and format data to ensure it meets New Zealand Post's addressing standards for mailing and update the names and addresses of people who have moved, using the New Zealand Post change of address service.