By Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa

Consumers increasingly expect a seamless end-to-end experience when shopping online – a quick and simple checkout and fast, flexible delivery. This is backed up by research which highlights that customer experience drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined.

It’s why many retailers are keen to deliver a seamless customer experience in 2025.

The important question is how can they make it a reality?

Collect clean customer data

Delivering a seamless customer experience requires accuracy and removing points of friction throughout the customer journey. Key to this is seamlessly and accurately collecting customer data, particularly address data, at the onboarding stage. After all, with clean and verified delivery addresses retailers can provide a fast and frictionless shopping experience that consumers expect.

Furthermore, up-to-date, clean customer data can be effectively analysed to gain valuable customer insight that can be used to keep them happy, with personalised communications and offers, for example.

With accurate customer address data expensive and dreaded mis-deliveries and ‘return-to-sender’ scenarios are much less likely. These failed deliveries not only cost retailers monetarily, but it also tends to impact on their reputation.

In fact, according to research 85 per cent of online shoppers said a poor delivery experience would prevent them from ordering from that retailer again. Plus, IMRG surveyed 1,000 consumers this year and only 41 per cent said their online orders are normally delivered on the first attempt or expected day.

Unfortunately, delivering data accuracy is not easy. About six million people move every year in England and Wales, which is largely the cause of customer contact data degrading at two per cent a month, or around 25 per cent a year on databases without regular intervention.

How to obtain accurate customer data

A good way to obtain accurate customer data is through using address lookup and address autocomplete tools at the checkout. These deliver accurate address data in real-time by providing a properly formatted, correct address at the onboarding stage, when the user starts to input theirs.

With reference postal data changing regularly, it’s good practice to ensure your data is updated on a regular basis, but in a way that does not affect the customer experience.

Tools such as these are very important because around 20 per cent of addresses entered online contain errors; these include spelling mistakes, wrong house numbers, and incorrect postcodes, as well as incorrect email addresses and phone numbers, typically due to errors when typing contact information.

Another benefit of the service is the number of keystrokes required when entering an address is reduced by up to 81 per cent. This speeds up the onboarding process and improves the whole experience.

Before obtaining an address lookup service it’s a good idea to test it to check how it delivers on accuracy, speed and overall user experience. Input a number of incomplete addresses, invalid addresses and international addresses and see what’s returned. If it can’t deliver accurately formatted correct addresses in real-time from around the world, it’s best to source one that can.

It’s important to recognise that you can deliver first point of contact verification across email and phone, so these vital contact datasets can also be verified in real-time. This is the foundation of delivering strong customer relationship management (CRM).

Access to a scalable data cleaning software-as-a-service (SaaS) is also advisable for those looking to cost-effectively deliver address and wider data quality in real-time across existing customer databases.

Retailers can cleanse and correct names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers in the UK, and also worldwide. Additionally, it’s possible to match records, ensuring no duplication, and data profiling is offered to help identify issues for further action.