NCOA® Update (National Change of Address)

Our NCOA® Update service helps you stay in touch with customers who have moved .You can simply and effectively update your customer records with new addresses.

What’s involved

Royal Mail offers a Redirection service to people who want their mail redirected when they move house. To apply for the service, customers complete an application form including details of their name, old address, new address, email and telephone numbers. Customers can submit applications at a local Post Office®, online or over the phone. All applications are ID verified for security purposes, making the data extremely accurate.

NCOA®Update data

The NCOA® Update File is built from our Redirection Service data. It contains the name of the person who has moved, the address they’ve left and the address they move to. Our data comes directly from the Redirection application forms of people who are moving. Your customers have already given us permission to forward their new contact details to organisations that have their old information. The file contains approximately 23 million records, and continues to grow at the rate of around 100,000 records per month.

Access to the most recent move

NCOA® Update gives you the most recent known address for an individual. So, if Mr Smith moved from address A to address B, subsequently to address C and finally to address D, NCOA® Update will only output address D, whether address A, B or C is used as the input address. This gives you access to the last available address. You can choose from daily, weekly or monthly update feeds. In all cases, you’ll receive the most recent data available to update your customer records.

Increasing customer contact

Retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than finding new ones. With NCOA® Update you can maintain contact with your customers when they move home, saving money and increasing profit.

Making multi-channel communication even easier

In the near future, NCOA® Update will offer you a separate file containing customers’ email address and telephone numbers. This file will give you the added benefit of being able to update customer email and telephone details as well as their address information. Multi-channel communication will be even easier.

A successful combination - NCOA® Suppress

If your database is more than a few months old, you may be wasting time and money by mailing people who are no longer at their old addresses. NCOA® Suppress is designed to compliment NCOA® Update and includes all moved from address records supplied from the Redirection service. Used with NCOA® Update, NCOA® Suppress will provide you with one of the most effective product combinations for ensuring your database is kept up to date. Find out more about NCOA® Supress.