Hill Dickinson case study
Hill Dickinson LLP is a leading and award-winning commercial law firm with more than 160 partners, 1100 people and offices in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Chester, Piraeus and Singapore. The firm offers a comprehensive range of legal services and invests strongly in their relationships, ensuring the organisations it represents benefit from a seamless and fully integrated service.
The challenge
Hill Dickinson has a large amount of contacts and, as a DX member, wanted to maximise their use of the DX network. When Hill Dickinson’s original contacts were analysed it became apparent that all available DX addresses were not represented in its records and, as with every live database, some contact information needed to be updated.
In addition to this issue, the DX directory wasn’t widely used by Hill Dickinson employees, with people often choosing to use Royal Mail as an alternative option. This was adding unnecessary cost to the firm’s operations and was a challenge DX looked to answer to enable a greater utilisation of the services.
The solution
Late in 2008, DX implemented an address book refresh service for Hill Dickinson. This service was carried out under strict confidentiality guidelines by specialist company ADF, a third party organisation. The service cross-checks a company's existing database against the full DX database to ensure correlation between the two. Essentially, this enables out of date addresses to be updated or deleted and DX addresses to be added where appropriate.
After the update, the refreshed database was uploaded by Hill Dickinson using secure protocols managed by AFD.
To ensure a DX address was used wherever possible, the DX desktop directory was implemented firm-wide. This ensures that all PC users in the organisation have default access to DX addresses, thus ensuring the DX is used even more frequently than if a user has to search for the address.
The benefits
After using the address cleansing service from AFD, Hill Dickinson almost quadrupled the number of DX addresses in their database. This improved the opportunity to use the DX network and has cut postage costs for the firm.
Keith Feeny, director of IT and operations at Hill Dickinson comments, “DX informed us that they had over 25,000 members in the DX directory, but we had less than 5,000 in our database, so we knew we weren’t utilising the DX service to its full potential. In the six months since we completed the address cleansing process we have seen a marked increase in our use of DX and are pleased with the cost-saving opportunity it has provided. In addition, we can now be confident that more of our mail will be delivered the next day, regardless of what is happening in the mail industry when we use DX”
Keith concludes, “We understand that using the DX system wherever possible inevitably leads to increases in our subscription levels. However we also recognise that using DX compared to Royal Mail saves us more, thereby offsetting the initial investment we are making for longer-term saving”.