Whistl Q&A with Loqate: Helping Businesses Reach Their Customers

This month we spoke to Paul Readey, Vice President (EMEA), at Loqate, a GBG solution. By combining market-leading technology with the most accurate location data available, Loqate gives businesses worldwide the precision and reliability to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Who is Loqate?

Loqate is the world’s most trusted location intelligence specialist. Our goal is to help every business in the world reach every customer in the world. We provide the most advanced software for capturing, verifying, and enriching address data globally, delivering the unmatched precision businesses need.

Our easy-to-integrate product portfolio includes address verification, email, phone, and bank validation solutions. Additionally, we offer Data Quality Services, helping businesses boost sales, maximise operational efficiency, and expand their customer base. By curating the most comprehensive data in the world, precisely formatted to local standards, and combined with market-leading technology, we enable organisations across the globe to deliver the best possible experiences to their customers.

How did the Loqate journey begin?

Loqate began with a mission to bring our customers the most curated location data in the world. Over the years, we've grown to verify addresses in 250 countries and territories, covering 6,500 languages, 180 postal formats, and eight-character sets, all through a single platform. By carefully selecting, verifying, and enriching our data, we help your business get closer to your customers than anyone else.

Who is in the Loqate team?

Loqate is a division of GBG plc, providing a global location confidence solution. With over 30 years of experience, we have a team of around 1,250 dedicated location intelligence experts who bring local industry insight. Our expertise and services make it easy for businesses to identify and verify customers and locations anywhere in the world.

Our solutions are widely regarded as market-leading, offering a versatile suite of products via a robust platform that can easily handle today’s business demands. Powered by best-in-class global data, we develop and maintain everything in-house. Like many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) organisations, we also have an extended team of 600 global partners, a network we are immensely proud of.

Who are Loqate’s current customers? What is the current makeup of your customer base?

Loqate processes over 50 million daily transactions for more than 20,000 customers, delivering unmatched value for organisations. Our customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises, spanning various industries including retail, logistics, finance, utilities, hospitality, and gaming.

What are the key challenges your customers face, and how does Loqate help solve them?

The key challenge faced by Loqate customers across all sectors is data quality and integrity. Our solutions address this by capturing the correct location data at the point of engagement or giving customers the opportunity to correct it before purchase. This significantly enhances the customer experience and benefits internal downstream processes.

Accurate data drives all decision-making, impacting fulfilment, route planning, fraud detection, marketing, and customer support. By providing accurate, standardised, and correctly formatted address data, we help reduce failed deliveries, reach a global audience, and onboard customers efficiently. Loqate's data verification, validation, and enhancement services help customers reduce costs, save time, and improve operational efficiency.

Who are your ideal future customers?

Loqate is fortunate to work with over 20,000 cross-sector customers globally. A common theme among them is their understanding of the true value of data and its commercial impact. Our ideal customers share similar traits regardless of their size or location—they are forward-thinking, innovative, and embrace their ability to differentiate from their competitors.

We value customers who are willing to invest in shaping the future, who see technology as an enabler, and who appreciate the benefits of mutual, meaningful long-term relationships. If a business recognises location data as a vital component of its success, Loqate can help.

How does the Loqate platform work?

Our technology responsibly embeds Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other leading technologies to deliver superior performance in capturing, verifying, and enriching address data across all 250 countries and territories. Designed to run on any application, our technology can scale to meet both local and global needs.

The Loqate engine offers cloud-native, low-code, platform-agnostic, and horizontally scalable solutions, making it ideal for both smaller and larger-scale deployments.

What makes Loqate unique?

1. One API to standardise and verify the world: Our Loqate engine delivers location data capture, verification, and enrichment capabilities for all 250 countries and territories through technology that can be deployed at speed and scale, anywhere.
2. Unrivalled data coverage & accuracy: Our proprietary address data curation and creation process generates a single best record for address, email, phone data and more.
3.  Responsible AI for superior parsing: Loqate has responsibly embedded AI in our verification engine. AI parsing delivers superior match rates and enhances capability in both existing and hard-to-address markets.
4.  Location confidence that goes beyond addresses: Our suite of global location insights provides formatted location data enhancing your confidence in your data. This includes email, phone, bank and address details such as establishments, geographic locations, and prominent points of interest,
5. Experts you can count on: Our Loqate Professional Services, Customer Success, and Support teams are location data experts worldwide, ready to assist you during every phase of your partnership with us, solving problems anytime, anywhere.

What is new at Loqate?

At Loqate, we continuously strive to innovate and improve our offerings and have recently announced two launches that we believe will greatly benefit our customers.

Firstly, we have redesigned our Global Location Finder from the ground up with the customer in mind, offering pinpoint accuracy at a predictable, controllable cost. With unlimited searches for a fixed price, you can provide your customers with an enhanced online-to-offline experience at an affordable cost.

Our new APIs have several use cases available, including building a store finder that enhances click-and-collect, return drop-off services, and in-store purchases—generating more revenue opportunities for our partners and customers. Other customers use it to tailor stock options by location, show nearby parcel collection points, geocode for use within third-party route planning tools, and limit delivery locations.

Another exciting update is our Geographical Data Hierarchy (GDH), providing city-to-postal-code data for every country and territory in the world. This comprehensive geospatial dataset goes beyond traditional offerings, simplifying the management of hierarchy data, effortlessly handling aliases, and ensuring consistency within your business systems. The key features of GDH make significant improvements to customers’ ability to manage their data across their entire ecosystem, including:

Effortless Data Integration: GDH allows you to seamlessly integrate hierarchy data from various sources, making it a versatile and adaptable solution for your unique business needs.

Alias Management: Say goodbye to inconsistencies. GDH effortlessly manages all aliases, providing a standardised approach to hierarchy data and minimising the risk of errors.

Comprehensive Coverage: From broad categories to specific details, GDH offers extensive coverage, giving you the flexibility to manage hierarchy data at multiple levels.

What benefits has Loqate discovered working with the Whistl Group?

In the dynamic landscape of the logistics sector, strategic partnerships play a pivotal role in enhancing operational efficiency, improving customer satisfaction, and staying competitive. A collaboration between Loqate, specialising in location data and address verification, and the Whistl Group, a leader in e-fulfilment and logistics, creates a synergy that addresses key challenges within the industry. By combining their unique strengths, the partnership offers comprehensive solutions for seamless supply chain management and last-mile delivery, benefiting businesses and customers alike. One notable example of this is Parcelhub and Loqate’s success with Thompson & Morgan. We worked together to collaboratively implement solutions that enhanced first-time deliveries. Within two months of rolling out SMART notifications, over 3,000 addresses were eliminated, and issues were significantly reduced, enabling the Thompson & Morgan customer service team to dedicate their time to dealing with more complex queries and focus on providing better customer experiences.

How important is a multi-carrier delivery approach to your clients?

In an era where consumers expect to receive what they want, when they want it, and where they want it - first time and every time - a multi-carrier delivery approach is increasingly important. With almost unlimited choice, consumer brand loyalty is declining, and Loqate customers must differentiate their offerings and work harder to acquire and retain customers.

Multi-carrier delivery options provide the flexibility that modern consumers demand, offering same-day or next-day delivery and specific time slots. This aligns with contemporary lifestyles. Loqate customers rely on a multi-carrier delivery system to remain agile, profitable, and efficient all the while meeting global customer expectations for speedy delivery, regardless of the product or service origin.

How important is proactive customer service to your clients?

Customer service is mission-critical to many of the brands that Loqate is fortunate to work with. It is recognised as a key differentiator and provides the opportunity for an organisation to excel in the eyes of its customers and prospects. Proactive support – be that via chatbot, phone, email, or other means once again enables the consumer to interact with a brand at a time of their choosing, via a channel of their choice. Conversely, it offers the brand the opportunity to address matters that might otherwise escalate unnecessarily. It is understood that offering best-in-class customer support must be underpinned by best-in-class data. At Loqate, we mirror this approach to customer service – our experts are available 24/5 via phone and email. We have a continually active Voice of the Customer initiative, and, like many other businesses, we launch and review periodic surveys while making sure to include findings in our roadmap.

Where do you see Loqate in the next five years?

At Loqate, our mission is simple yet powerful: to help businesses gain confidence in addresses and locations worldwide. We do this today through our industry-leading set of capabilities in global addressing. This is just the beginning.

In addition to the exponential growth of digital buying, we are witnessing a seismic shift in the way digital commerce journeys will be conducted in the coming 5+ years. From generative AI changing the way people purchase goods and interact with apps and websites, to digital wallets becoming the typical way of purchasing content. This will bring the exponential need for capturing, verifying, and understanding accurate locations, whether that be an address, a geolocation, or POI/Landmarks. In addition to this, businesses will need to be able to trust the locations for all these transactions.

We see Loqate powering the next-gen digital commerce journeys through our universal location search and verification vision. In a world where people type less and less, and where Generative & Conversational AI UX is the norm, we see Loqate providing AI & Conversational APIs that can be embedded in the new UX. These will capture and verify locations that are fed in and out of those journeys. As positive and negative events happen in locations, we see Loqate powering alerts and notifications to businesses to be able to shift decision-making. We see signals and insights to be as important as the address or location themselves. We see the Loqate standard solving hard to address locations globally using our innovative Data Creation AI.

How do you see your partnership with the Whistl Group evolving?

Our initial partnership with Parcelhub – part of the Whistl Group has been a success. We are currently looking to expand Loqate’s verification solution to the wider Whistl Group to ensure every single address that enters the business is verified before label printing.

Moving forward, the partnership between Loqate and Whistl shows enormous potential in enhancing data verification services and optimising reverse logistics solutions. Loqate's technology ensures accurate address information, optimising reverse logistics for Whistl by improving return processing and customer satisfaction. Together, we are poised to revolutionise delivery operations, drive efficiency, and deliver exceptional service.