Case Studies
Alpha Telecom
Who are they?
Established in 1996, Alpha has built its reputation on delivering low cost, high quality international telecom services for the consumer market and is now one of Europe's largest alternative telecommunications resellers. They specialise in prepaid telecommunications services, and command a major share of the UK prepaid telephony market.
Alpha Telecom is a fully operating division of the TELE2 Group - Europe's leading alternative telecoms operator. They provide cheap and simple telecom services throughout Europe with over 29 million customers across 25 countries. TELE2 offer a broad range of products and services in fixed and mobile telephony, Internet access, data networks, cable TV and content services.
Why did they come to us?
Alpha Telecom's website offers simple and easy registration for their telephone services. An important part of the registration process involves collecting a customer's address. It is essential that this address is postally correct, for both billing and registration purposes.
For some time the web form for registration had included an address lookup feature, accessing Royal Mail's PAF® (Postcode Address File) data, to help customers complete the online registration process quickly and efficiently, as well as maintaining the quality of the Alpha Telecom customer database. Initially Alpha Telecom held and maintained their own copy of PAF® for this purpose. However they decided to look for an alternative way of managing address collection on their site. They did not want to move away from using PAF®, as this is the definitive UK Postal address database. They hoped to find a supplier who could host and maintain the data for them, whilst offering competitive rates to cover both the PAF® licence and support.
Alpha Telecom came across the PostCoder Web SOAP Service offered by Allies Computing Ltd. They were looking for a hosted PAF® data address lookup solution, with better pricing and good support service - PostCoder Web SOAP offered them a solution that met all these requirements.
What are the benefits?
Time and money saved
The benefits of moving to PostCoder Web were immediately seen both in cost and time. Having the hosted service meant Alpha Telecom no longer had to worry about updating their PAF® but continued to benefit from collecting postally correct addresses.
Happier customers
Customers were happier when they didn't have to repeatedly type their full address, and levels of first time delivery were significantly higher as a result of consistently postally valid addresses. More recently, verifying addresses has also been recognised to assist in fighting fraud.
Try before you buy
As always, Allies offered a free 21 day free trial. Paul Musgrave from Alpha Telecom explains: "We were provided with the free look ups to start with which we established we could use and integrate the service into our website. The trial was very good and we could see it was exactly what we wanted".
Range of examples
As well as attractive price options, PostCoder Web SOAP offers a wide range of usable examples including the ASP.NET which were used by Alpha Telecom's developers. "I found the examples easy to follow and use. We had Allies PostCoder Web service integrated into our website within a couple of hours of registering for the free 21 day trial" says Andy Cook, Developer for Alpha Telecom.
Throughout the mid telecoms industry, Windows is more frequently used so it made sense for Alpha Telecom to make sure their software was compatible with the majority. All their software is Microsoft and the main development language is ASP.NET. Like all Allies® solutions, PostCoder Web SOAP offers examples and Help Files for all the major Microsoft development languages.
