RAVE Coffee is a specialist roaster, growing fast and selling more and more product online. It is with increased business that the need arises for a reliable, well-managed delivery partner, and Royal Mail fit the bill for the Cirencester-based company.

When founders Rob and Vikki quit the corporate world for a life in Australia, they never believed that a few years later they’d be back in the UK, setting up what would become a successful coffee roastery. But that’s how RAVE Coffee started – out of a mobile coffee van in Sydney in 2009. Vikki says, ‘We learned all about coffee in Australia. When we came back to the UK, we had become passionate about coffee, so we brought RAVE to the UK.’

The company started with a small Toper roaster, but grew fast. Nine months later it moved to its current premises, where it has a café and roasting facilities in one location, as well as ten employees. It sells through its own website and on Amazon, as well as through direct relationships with corporate customers. Vikki says, ‘We built a reputation selling to local businesses and suppliers. We started to get noticed online, and now the majority of our sales are through Amazon.’

Working with Royal Mail, RAVE now has a daily collection and send mail using Royal Mail 24 & 48, 1st Class & 2nd Class, which are simple, fast services it can rely on.

With regular collections and trusted deliveries, RAVE Coffee maintains a 98 per cent positive feedback rating on Amazon and is now looking at franchising its business model around the world.

Crunch time

Biscuiteers sells handmade biscuits, chocolates and macaroons all over the world.

The company needed a reliable way to get its handmade gifts around the UK and the world. A quick response at busy periods is crucial to business success.

Starting online in 2007, the company now sells biscuits for all occasions made by two London-based kitchens – and even run icing classes and host parties. Lauren Juster, digital marketing and website merchandiser at the company says, ‘We have two shops in London and make hundreds of items a day. Each one is hand-iced; quality and creativity are the main ingredients of our success.’

Biscuiteers has built up a loyal following all over the world. This is partly due to a strong social media presence, where it has more than 15,000 Facebook likes and almost 90,000 Google+ followers. Lauren says, ‘Social media is a great way to tell people about our creative approach. We can reach people all over the world and run campaigns at key times.’

With Royal Mail Collections and Despatch Manager online, Biscuiteers has employed a service that scales up and down when needed and trust that items will arrive on time.

The Royal Mail service is helping Biscuiteers grow the business, and saves time too – spending up to a day less a month on administration tasks. Now the company has just opened its next store in London.

New from Royal Mail, AddressNow contact and address data management services designed to help increase business efficiency, improve customer experience, and drive marketing performance.

As well as its flagship services employed by RAVE and Biscuiteers and in response to business demand, Royal Mail has recently introduced AddressNow – a whole new set of cloud-based contact and address data management tools and services specifically designed to improve customer experience, automate business processes and improve the quality of customer data.

According to research published by Royal Mail Data Services in conjunction with DataIQ in March 2015, only three in ten businesses validate customer address data at the point of capture, while 94 per cent say address information errors impact on business performance and customer loyalty. Such errors range from out-of-date information, incomplete data, missing data, duplicate data, data in an incorrect field, and spelling mistakes.

As a cloud-based service, AddressNow provides businesses with affordable contact and address data management services without the need for complex integration and restrictive up-front investment.

For your website

For businesses who sell goods and services online, AddressNow can be embedded in your website to make it easier for your customers to look up and enter their correct address details online. Address data is validated in real-time and updated daily helping to make sure you’re making use of the most up-to-date data available. Using accurate address data means more accurate mailing, parcel deliveries, shipping, and fulfilment. You’ll help to reduce the costs of failed deliveries and, at the same time, you’ll deliver a better customer experience because customers are more likely to complete their purchases, fewer shopping carts are abandoned, and deliveries are received as expected.

For your internal business systems

AddressNow can also be used to support your internal business systems making it faster for your employees to find and enter the right contact and address information when handling customer orders, service or support enquiries, or financial and contractual transactions over the phone or in-store. In this way, AddressNow also helps you to reduce time and costs.

To further help with improving and maintaining overall customer data quality and the provisioning of customer data, AddressNow also provides businesses with a self-service data cleansing tool as well as direct access to Royal Mail contact and address data.

Find out more about Royal Mail’s services and start a free trial of AddressNow.