Maintaining excellence in accuracy for customers

A lot has changed since Corney & Barrow began trading as independent Wine Merchants 230 years ago. Now with a global marketplace and multiple ways to communicate, how have they managed to retain their identity and continue to deliver excellence to their customers?

Offering a combination of high quality, honestly-priced wines, Corney & Barrow aim to work as closely as they can with both suppliers and customers to create relationships that are individual, personal and made to last. They have built a range of unique products that are delivered direct to customers without the need for middle-men.

Creating relationships with suppliers and customers depends on trust. Customer referrals are key to Corney & Barrow as they do not advertise! Eighty percent of all sales take place over the phone and this is intentional. They want to talk to their customers and build strong relationships.

While maintaining their strong relationship-focused ethos, Corney & Barrow have made full use of the latest technology available. During a planned upgrade to a new enterprise resource planning system, Corney & Barrow identified the need for address validation.

The brief
Tariq Malik, Group Head of IT, oversaw the upgrade to the new system. We spoke with him to find out the functionality that was required and why.

“Firstly, we wanted to establish that we had accurate contact data for the 15,000+ customers on our database, to ensure that contact could be maintained and that we were building our system on a solid data foundation – essential to maintaining strong relationships.

Second on our list of requirements was ensuring that all new data being entered – whether by our staff taking calls or web customers – was correct at the point of entry.

With expansion into the Asian market a current focus, we also needed the functionality to validate international addresses.”

Having these tight data controls in place would ensure that Corney & Barrow continued to maximise their relationships with customers and exceed already high expectations.

Implementing data controls
During the data migration to the new system, AFD Refiner was used. Tariq says, “After a demonstration by Jonathan Stocks, one of AFD Software’s Data Quality Consultants, we purchased AFD Refiner due to its ease of use, simplicity and good results.”

To ensure only accurate contact data enters the system, AFD Postcode Plus was deployed at the point of entry, delivering address validation of the customer’s address at letterbox level.

Discussing the implementation of Postcode Plus Tariq says: “To meet our requirements, we needed a solution that would be autonomous and require no further IT resources once implemented. Our chosen solution would have to provide automatic updates to the data and be fully managed – AFD Software understood our requirements and delivered.”

To validate international addresses ensuring only accurate data enters the system would require specialist knowledge of international address formats: AFD WorldAddress has this knowledge.

Tariq goes on to say “Having introduced address data validation, we didn’t want our expansion plans to allow inaccurate or wrongly formatted international addresses onto our system. AFD’s WorldAddress product instantly solved this issue too.”

www.corneyandbarrow.com