One City per Postal Code? Not Always

When looking at postal codes around the world, there are cases where two different cities are served by the same postal code. For example, the zip code 94608 in California is used for both Emeryville and parts of Oakland. One postal code, two cities.

Additionally, there are cases where the name of the city varies, depending on the language. Brussels is a great example. In Dutch, it’s Brussels. In French, it’s Bruxelles. Both are official languages of Belgium.

Within AdvantageCS, cities can be set up to handle both of these cases, thereby making address self-service more targeted to the customer and label generation more specific. Both are subtle ways to improve customer service and provide a more personalized product to your customers.

Using the Postal Code setup view, you can now set up multiple cities to use that same postal code. It might look something like this:

In addition to the city name, you can also specify the Language Code for each. This is an optional field.

If there is only a single city specified for the postal code when customer information is added, the city is automatically filled in, streamlining order entry. But if more than one exists, no defaulting action takes place. Instead, the drop-down list displays the available values. Note that although Advantage provides a drop-down of the city name, this is not a validated field on that display. You can still enter a city name that is not in the list and Advantage will accept it.

Updating your postal code setup in this way is a great way to support regional city name preferences. Either by offering an optional city name, or providing the city name in the preferred language of the customer, Advantage will assist you in providing great customer service and specialized attention to your consumers.

If this is a feature that you’d like to explore implementing, or if you’d simply like more information, contact your AdvantageCS representative.