Most organisations can tell you exactly how many communications they sent last month. The send log is clear: every renewal notice, every statement, every rates assessment, every disclosure has a timestamp next to it.
What’s harder to answer is a different question: how many of those communications actually reached the person they were meant for? For most businesses, the gap between “sent” and “reached” is an operational nuisance. For regulated industries it’s a risk.
When delivery is an obligation
Financial services providers, insurers, utilities and local councils all send communications that aren’t optional. Some are needed to meet a legal or regulatory obligation, such as policy renewals, changes to terms, hardship notices, rates assessments and annual statements. Others are what customers rely on to make decisions about their money, their services and their homes.
For banks, insurers and non-bank deposit takers, this sits within a wider expectation. Under the Conduct of Financial Institutions (CoFI) regime, financial institutions must treat consumers fairly in all their dealings with them, including helping them make informed decisions. That’s hard to do if important information never reaches them.
In these situations, pressing send isn’t the finish line. If a notice goes to an address the customer left two years ago, the obligation behind it may not have been met, whatever the send log says. And when a customer, an auditor or a regulator asks whether someone was properly notified, “we sent it” isn’t always enough of an answer.
Where the gap comes from
The cause is rarely dramatic. Most of the time it comes down to everyday data issues that build up over time:
- Addresses that haven’t been checked against current postal data
- Duplicate records, where updates are made to one version but not the other
- Incomplete or inconsistent contact details across different systems
- Email addresses that quietly stopped working
Each issue is small. Spread across tens of thousands of customers and a full year of communications, they add up to a real gap between what an organisation thinks it has told its customers and what those customers have actually received.
Why a one-off cleanse isn’t enough
A common response is a data cleanse before a big send. It helps, but it doesn’t last. Customers move, change providers and update their details all the time. Without an ongoing process, data quality slips again until returns spike and another round of fixes begins.
The organisations that manage this well build accuracy into their everyday workflows instead of treating it as a reaction to problems. In practice, that means:
- Validating data before it reaches production, not after the returns come back
- Treating returned mail and bounced emails as useful signals, and feeding them back into customer records
- Keeping clear records of what was sent, to whom, when, and through which channel
- Using a second channel, such as SMS or email, to follow up important communications that might otherwise be missed
Done consistently, these steps close the gap between sent and reached. They also give organisations something valuable: the ability to show, with confidence, that important communications got to the right people.
The invisible part of getting it right
When customer communications work well, nobody notices. The notice arrives on time, at the right address, with the right information. That’s how it should be. But behind that simple result is a process that has to be built and looked after on purpose, starting with the data.
Talk to Dataprint
If your organisation sends communications that customers and regulators rely on, now is a good time to ask how confident you are that they’re reaching the right people. Dataprint helps organisations move from reactive data fixes to a structured, ongoing approach to data quality, so that sent and reached mean the same thing.
Get in touch with the Dataprint team to talk about a data review.