One of the issues with new developments is that no one is able to find your new address. Either delivery drivers, online shopping systems, financial services, etc.
We’ve tried to reduce the effect by
A) getting Royal Mail to activate the address on their PAF (postcode address file) as soon as we could, right after we exchanged. This file is updated daily and used by data providers who in turn supply the data to companies.
B) submitting map updates, error reports to various Map providers, Google, Navteq, Waze, etc. so hopefully get included on the next round of Sat Nav updates.
C) Finding the nearest existing postcode and supplying that in delivery notes for drivers to plug in to their Sat Navs.
so far the best performer has been Ocado, who managed to manually add us to their database and their drivers generally manage to find us without issue and they can add their own notes to the address for other drivers.
the worst performer has been: the Government! Even 3 months on I can’t use the DirectGov portal to update my driving license or HMRC details. They have no real support route for anyone knowledgeable to look at the issue and their pages say they update their PAF data within 2 weeks. #EGovernmentFail!
To be fair, local government seems better, with the district council having more of an idea.
Not too sure about the county council as I can’t get register to their Broadband campaign with the address, but that may use a different data set entirely. We’ll see how good their data is when it comes to school applications and they need to work out catchment and distance to the front door.
Personally, i think part of the problem is probably with one dataset provider as i know a previous employer uses them and they can’t provide insurance quotes based on my address. Not sure whether it’s their dataset or the frequency of updates the client has signed up to.
The other really annoying thing is when delivery drivers blame us for not finding the address!
