Addressing is a perennial challenge for energy retailers, who must have an accurate physical address for connection and metering - or risk frustrated customers and lost business.
Addressing has become more complex as cities and suburbs grow, particularly with inner city townhouse and infill developments becoming increasingly common. Street numbers change and properties are subdivided, requiring the correct processes to capture and verify new addresses to ensure services are installed and maintained efficiently. Retirement villages, commercial developments and apartment complexes present their own problems, with many built and occupied with temporary addresses. It can take six months to a year for a new property to start showing up on property-based mapping platforms, or for a revised address to be established.
When onboarding new customers, this can leave energy retailer staff with the difficult task of working out the correct address for the property by searching various online applications, including Google Street View. And for the customer who just wants to get their connection set up, having to wait because their property that can’t be linked back to the Installation Control Point (ICP) can be incredibly frustrating. Your customer service staff may be left to deal with angry customers … and so it goes on. Faulty addressing can be a time-consuming, frustrating and expensive problem.
Verify addresses and cleanse your database
Based on more than 20 years of data from multiple sources, CoreLogic's addressing database is a comprehensive and regularly updated dataset comprising around 2.3 million verified physical addresses, each with a single unique identifier used by the electricity distributors, which helps to confirm which services are available at that property.
Andy Stark, Client Director for Telco & Utilities at CoreLogic, says CoreLogic addresses are now used by major electricity distributors and many retailers across New Zealand. Data can also be cleansed against the Electricity Authority database to help improve accuracy, particularly for apartments and townhouses.
“Energy retailers who use the same address dataset as distributors may reduce effort and costs through less admin time spent on investigating issues, and improve the customer experience by enabling faster service connections” Andy says.
CoreLogic addressing can be integrated into energy retailers’ own websites and IT systems via file transfer or API. For the team member tasked with connecting power for customers, that can mean no more searching on various websites to find the right property.
“Of course we think CoreLogic’s data set is the most comprehensive,” says Andy, “but don’t take our word for it. It’s also used by New Zealand’s first responders and major logistics companies. That’s how great it is.”
Continuous, timely updates
CoreLogic Senior Geospatial Developer Bryan Teahan says the strength of CoreLogic addressing is that it is constantly updated, with a specialist team adding over 750 addresses and updating another 4,000 every week, meticulously cross-referencing against other databases including:
- Land Information New Zealand’s Landonline dataset
- NZ Post’s Geospatial Postal Address File
- Local councils, fibre companies, courier services and other spatial and non-spatial data sources.
“CoreLogic has several hundred thousand more addresses than any other New Zealand dataset,” Bryan says. “When it comes to subdivisions and greenfield developments, we are often months ahead of official addressing.”
With many electricity retailers now incorporating broadband offers in their residential packages, CoreLogic is collating local fibre company data feeds and linking information back to the single unique identifier. The resulting dataset will enable major fibre network companies across NZ to instantly identify the services available at a customer’s address.
CoreLogic also offers a data cleansing service to identify and update incorrect addresses.
“Recently a new energy retailer came to us to improve their addressing,” Andy says. “We completed a match of their dataset against their addresses that showed just how many were inaccurate. A lot of companies don’t understand the scale of the problem as addressing is a historical challenge that clients may simply accept as normal."
When it comes to addressing, every client has different requirements. Talk to your CoreLogic account manager or get in touch below to find out how our addressing data can integrate with your own platform to add value and enhance your data.
CoreLogic New Zealand