Search
Close this search box.

Company Spotlight: Fetchify

Russell Jones, CEO of Fetchify

“Fetchify makes it really simple for organisations to capture and verify data about their customers, reducing friction, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing failed deliveries by as much as 50%.”

Founded: 2008

  

Headquartered: Maidenhead, UK

Employees: 11-50

Customers: Nearly 10,000

URL: https://fetchify.com/

What does your company offer retailers?

Our tools validate the data that customers enter at checkout in real time.

Our flagship product is our postal address lookup and capture solution, Address Auto-Complete, which streamlines the process of entering a full address which can be accomplished with 80% fewer keystrokes on average, making the user experience quick and convenient and so increasing retailer conversion rate.

We recently added three new data validation tools to our suite of products – Email, Phone and Bank Account validation. Fetchify’s new products are all designed to enhance the user experience, reducing the effort to input key data, and reduce hidden costs associated with poor quality data.

The tools easily integrate into an ecommerce site, CRM platform and any kind of customer handling process – in other words, anywhere that capturing accurate customer data is essential.

We help process millions of transactions every day for thousands of clients ranging from small ecommerce start-ups to large household brands. We rebranded from Crafty Clicks to Fetchify in June 2020 as we felt it made sense to have a brand that expresses our key proposition; to be friendly, accessible experts that help fetch and verify accurate customer data – with a smile.

How does this boost a retailer’s bottom line?

 

Firstly, our customers can boost their sales through a simpler customer experience. Surveys show that over 40% of customers abandon baskets online compared to less than a quarter who do so in store. We streamline the customer’s path to checkout to deliver that sale.

We also reduce the risk of failed deliveries, which cost the industry £1.6 billion per year, by ensuring all data is accurate.

How do you deliver on this USP?

As well as our proprietary technology, which includes our algorithms and the best data sources, we have a great team who will partner with you to achieve your goals.

Our tools make it quicker and easier for end users to complete checkouts and online registration forms or to interact with your organisation’s contact centre teams  .

Our tech is super easy to integrate, with over 30 ready-made plug-ins for all the leading eCommerce and CRM platforms. Our software-as-a-service model means that you can deploy the technology and experience benefits straight away without committing to a big CapEx investment, and as we bill per lookup we can scale as your business does.

The team is on hand and ready to support clients on the rare occasions they do have any problems with their integration or want to do any customisation.

As the friendly, accessible experts we like to be the complete opposite of some of the large, faceless corporates who also operate in this space.

Which retailers do you work with?

We have nearly 10,000 customers, which is amazing considering we’ve done almost zero sales and marketing and every single one of those has come to us.

We work with a very wide range of clients – from big household names such as RBS and Heinz, to ecommerce specialists such as ToolStop and Moonpig. We work with clients from all sectors of retail – home and garden, banks and other financial services, fashion, food & drink, automotive, sports and travel and transport.

We’ve seen massive growth in more unusual areas in recent months due to the Covid 19 outbreak – home leisure and sports equipment, hobbies and crafts, and medical equipment; and particularly amongst small, start-up almost “kitchen-table” businesses who have really found their feet and established a new customer base during the lockdown.

What challenges are you addressing for multichannel retailers who aim to meet peak season demands?

Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding and have high expectations of ecommerce retailers, especially during peak seasons like back to school, Halloween, Black Friday and Xmas.  They expect a smooth checkout experience with Postcode Lookup or Address Auto-complete – and they reject retailers who make things harder or slower for them.  When was the last time you had to fill in your address from scratch and how did that make you feel about that brand or that retailer?  Competing with the marketplaces and with mega-retailers for loyalty and market share is hard enough without pushing customers away by having a clunky checkout experience. 

Fulfilment and logistics networks are stretched to breaking point during peak periods.  Every failed delivery is not just wasted cost, it’s also one less consumer receiving their goods that day – potentially essential goods in the case of an elderly or vulnerable person.  By validating every address using Postcode Lookup or Address Auto-Complete, our customers have shown that delivery teams can reduce failed deliveries by around 50%.  This translates into huge resource savings and direct cost savings.

What do you see as the key challenges for retailers and suppliers over the coming years?

The Covid-19 lockdown has been a challenging and unpredictable period for all businesses. To support the ‘Back to Work’ phase, as global government restrictions ease to boost the economy, Fetchify is offering all customers free usage of Phone and Bank validation, for the remainder of 2020. These products add even more reliability to customers’ data, meaning fewer complaints, better deliverability, and less chance of fraud.

In the medium and long-term, the greatest challenge for retailers and suppliers is competing (and partnering) with marketplaces like eBay and Amazon for share of mind and share of wallet. Having smooth, personalised, multi-channel experiences is a basic requirement and it’s the entry-point for a consumer journey that maximises satisfaction and lifetime value.

Ultimately, retailers need to create inspiring experiences online that go way beyond what consumers can experience in a physical store, finding new ways to incorporate original creative content into a historically rigid online environment.  Headless eCommerce is a major step forward in this direction and again our tools integrate seamlessly into these platforms.

What targets are you aiming to achieve in the next five years?

We’ve grown primarily through word of mouth.  We don’t employ hundreds of sales and marketing people like some of our big corporate competitors – that way our prices can be a little bit cheaper too.

We are focused on making our technology even better, making it even easier to work with and providing the best support in the industry.  Being part of the ClearCourse group, which acquired us in 2019, ensures we have the investment to continue to add improvements for our customers.

Every one of our nearly 10,000 customers has come to us because we have a reputation for great tech and great support and we want to make sure we continue to deliver on that.

Read More