Appearance & Presentation of Contact Details

However you contact your customers, it’s easy to overlook exactly how you display their name and address details and how you personally address them.

Yet it’s these details that your customers are often particular about, especially the older generations. They’ll notice them first and first impressions count.

Get it right with accurate presentation and with the appropriate greeting and you’ll help make sure that first impression is a positive one.

Or you can get it wrong with careless presentation and an unsuitable greeting. Then, no matter how compelling your promotional offer or eye-catching your brochure, your business may be viewed less favourably.

Such imperfections with the appearance of personal details are often the result of errors made during data capture, telephone transcription or the completion of online forms.

But I can correct and transform this vital information for you. Postal addresses will be updated, completed, corrected and properly formatted. Names will be accurately displayed so that your communications  observe appropriate conventions and etiquette. The results can make a real difference to customer perceptions of your business and whether they’ll be responsive to your promotional offer.

To provide you with the very best results, I can provide a range of services that will ensure your customers details are professionally presented:

Case Conversion of Names

There’s no better way to spoil the impact of personalising your letter or email than by the incorrect use of upper and lower case letters in a person’s name. Do so and your message may appear anything but personal.

Software such as Excel has basic tools for data casing but it won’t accurately correct or convert all names. It can also introduce new errors that were not already present.

To ensure you get the best results, I use a program which specialises in correctly capitalizing forenames and surnames.

Generating a Salutation

A salutation is the introductory personalised greeting on your letters or emails. It’s built from the name of the recipient. Ensuring it’s appropriate helps promote a positive impression of your business.

The rules for generating it are flexible so the results meet your requirements. They’ll cater for whether you write in a strictly formal or a more relaxed style as well as taking account of the structure of your data. Additionally, people with titles, ranks and honours will be addressed correctly by matching against reference databases derived from Debrett’s and Who’s Who.

To improve results, a Gender Determination program can be applied against the forename if the title prefix is absent from the name. If the forename is absent or unisex, then a default title and salutation of your choice will be allocated. Here’s a few examples of typical formal salutations:

Generating a Valediction

A valediction is the closing sign-off for your letter, usually appearing directly above the signature.

The valediction is not usually a fixed value. It should be derived by evaluating the salutation, ensuring that `Yours sincerely` and `Yours faithfully` are used correctly.

Splitting Names

If the title prefix, forename and surname of your customers are all merged together into a single field, these components can be split into their individual parts.

Storing this information as separate data fields is beneficial for assessing gender as well as generating the correct salutation and valediction.

The splitting process can also be applied to many other types of data which need to be divided into distinct elements, including: