Poste Maroc uses Precisely solutions to reduce undeliverable mail

Poste Maroc reduces undeliverable mail by approximately 90%

In some parts of the world, postal service is taken for granted. In other areas, mail delivery is more challenging. In Morocco, numerous housing development projects, the lack of address standardization and language complexity increase the challenge. Poste Maroc, a company that distributes letters and packages throughout Morocco, was using a long and tedious manual method to reduce mail that could not be delivered to customers. With the help of Precisely Spectrum, the company deployed an automated solution that streamlined address validation and has reduced the rate of undeliverable mail by approximately 90 percent.

As more and more new housing developments are emerging in Morocco, Poste Maroc finds that addresses are often incomplete or imprecise. “People might use ‘road’ instead of ‘avenue,’ or they might use a nickname in the address,” explains Said Bellaouchou, Poste Maroc’s head of addressing. Plus, addresses may appear in French or Arabic, or they may be mistranslated from one language to another.

Most of the mail distributed by Poste Maroc’s B2B service comes from a small number of customers: banks, telecommunications companies and public bodies. Undeliverable rates sometimes reached 12 to 15 percent. “Our customers might not get paid if mailed notices could not be delivered,” Bellaouchou says. “We had to ensure addresses were accurate.” Bellaouchou hired 30 address operators to manually compare envelopes against a Poste Maroc database of address information. “We needed to streamline the process of confirming that addresses were correct, all the more so because currently all deposits of large customers are captured and processed by automated sorting systems.”

Poste Maroc released a public tender, to which Casablanca-based integrator Finatech and Precisely responded by proposing the Spectrum Technology Platform solution. Finatech assisted with implementation of Spectrum Data Quality modules including Universal Address, which offers address validation, correction and standardization in more than 220 countries; Spectrum Data Normalization, which standardizes address variations; and Spectrum Quality Connectors for connecting with client systems. “They were extremely professional and helped us understand what was feasible with this project,” Bellaouchou says. “The Precisely and Finatech team did outstanding work for us, going the extra mile to succeed where another firm had failed twice before.”

Now, Poste Maroc offers a premier, add-on service that uses Spectrum to compare a customer’s address file against the Poste Maroc database. When an address is imprecise, the solution returns multiple standardized addresses, rating each on the likelihood that it is the address the customer intended. The solution can also use optical character recognition (OCR) technology on the sorting platform to read addresses printed on envelopes, then compare those addresses against the Poste Maroc database.

Read the full customer story to learn more.