Local Government GIS Techs and Addressing Agents, I need advice regarding FedEx and UPS contacts

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4
05-12-2015 10:07 AM
by Anonymous User
Not applicable

  I work in the GIS Department for the government of Hamilton County, TN and have for over 6 years now. We have a little more than 300,000 residents so we are a sizable County with lots of addressing issues. Part of my daily job is to resolve these addressing issues by either assigning a new address, correcting an old one, changing duplicate or incorrect road names, adding in data from new subdivisions, etc. We have direct contacts with all the utility companies, emergency and government offices, postal and police offices. We send copies of our documentation to these offices for them to update their systems and match the newly changed addresses. We also let Google know by using their online mapping and reporting each problem individually. Now that we built a reputation with them, they tend to make the changes for us pretty quickly. However, time and time again, we have ran into issues with both FedEx and UPS not providing a contact method or online option to update addresses and roads.

  We get complaints from affected residents that they are unable to receive packages after the changes occur due to UPS and FedEx not having the updates and not recognizing the new address or road name. Does anyone deal with these same problems? If so, is there an established and reliable contact for either company that I could get from somewhere? I have called, emailed and tried all kinds of ways to get a contact and cannot manage to do that. I am currently looking into FedEx's Delivery Manager, but most of the time it requires a tracking number for a specific shipment and will not let me just make a general change to an address within their system. I can't seem to get them to understand that my changes would affect every shipment to that specific address and not just one package or shipment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I really look forward to reading your responses.

Thanks in advance!

~Amy~

4 Replies
JeffWard
Occasional Contributor III

Amy,

I feel your pain.  I face this same issue, most calls come from people not getting their packages.  I would be very interested to see what input others have on this topic.  I have always waited for those addresses to "filter up", I wish I could say they filter down, but unfortunately it is like getting water to flow uphill.  I have always wondered which databases UPS and FedEx use for their address verification process.  If they maintain their own, you would think they would be in regular contact with folks like us.

Jeff

Jeff Ward
Summit County, Utah
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JeffWard
Occasional Contributor III

I should mention we are a rural county so we don't get the targeted focus urban areas do on map/address updates in the big databases.  Google's crowd sourced correction method infuriates me.  I have been given elevated edit priveleges with HERE, but I haven't had the chance to try it out.

Jeff Ward
Summit County, Utah
by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Jeff,

I understand your problems with Google. It took me a while to get their attention and get things fixed. I have found that it helps to use your government email rather than your personal email. I guess the ".gov" is a little more credible. Also, every time I submit a problem I include my job title and responsibility of addressing. They seem to get back to me a little quicker now.

As far as HERE goes, I have the elevated privileges on the Map Creator as well, but I could never get it to work for me. After several emails with them, I figured out they they are only supported on Firefox which I do not use at all. This is very inconvenient for me, so until they are supported by Chrome or even IE, I will not be using them. 

Thanks for your response. I am glad to know that I am not alone in my frustrations.

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NathanBruce1
Occasional Contributor

I happened across this post while looking for something else.  Very surprised to find it on Geonet, totally agree with what your saying and it reflects an issue I've been battling with for sometime now as well and continue to, working as a addressing aggregator and issue resolver at a County in Ontario, Canada.  I've been using my personal email with google, because I have a high local editor level, but that doesn't seem to help validate things without others there to agree to my changes.  Im seeing that some issues are resolved almost immediately and others that i have input multiple times are still being ignored by google officials.  After looking at other data sources like OSM and HERE in those same areas, I had a hunch that google might have relied on external mapping sources to add that data to their mapping and thus didn't want to change it.  So i updated in Here and OSM to see if that would help push change, nothing to report.   As of this post google had readopted a new editing front end, less like reporting, but not quite like true feature editing they once had.  Waze also has its own editing tool, however you must have app usage scoring that would elevate you to a editing privilege, plus your driving activity must correlate to the same areas that your editing; none of this helps folks of our kind.   I spent a couple of hours on the phone with UPS trying to find out how to update their system, with nothing gained.  Fedex was the same, deliveries to an area that we readdressed were not being made until the driver learned the new streets and then abruptly stopped while they were off on holidays.  I tried several attempts to speak with supervisors of those delivery centres with no return calls.  Here in Canada, our nationwide postal system, Canada Post, has an address validation database that some delivery systems use, though it looks like UPS and Fedex, either dont update from it regularly or have completely their own system.  I assume cost is prohibitive, as open data has not hit our Census or Postal System like that of the US.  I basically say to residents that if they are having delivery issues to report that via the tracking number, it seems to be the only way to force change, which might only go upstream to the delivery centre and not on to the data system itself.   

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