There’s an issue with foreign language characters and Royal Mail Despatch Manager Online (DMO) that you need to be aware of.
Tamebay reader Louise spotted the issue with international addresses on DMO – When importing an international address which contains foreign characters into the address the system automatically deletes the foreign characters.
DOM doesn’t replace foreign characters with a UK equivalent or forewarn you that this has happened. As such you could end up printing a label with an address that is incomplete. For example if an address contains an umlaut the system just deletes it.
Louise spotted this with a parcel destined for the Norwegian village of Øvre and the Ø was causing the issue.
It appears that the first address field in DMO will only accept English characters and in order to add in localised addresses you have to activate a new field that allows you to put in the address with characters
To activate localised addresses you need to select the country, activate the localised address box then add the address in the new box which is time consuming to say the least. One can’t help wondering why as soon as you select the country from the drop down it doesn’t automatically bring up the localised address fields?
Anyone using DMO needs to be aware of this and while we’ve not checked, we’re crossing our fingers that any automation software you may be using is configured to check the localised address box in the background.
Many thanks to Louise for the heads up on this!
3 Responses
This is such a huge issue and time costing problem for us. We use DMO and its just so frustrating!….I have already addressed this issue to my Royal Mail region representative, the DMO helpdesk are aware of this and yet nothing has been done about it for the past 15 months!…Royal Mail really need to pull their finger out, their IT infrastructure is so old, they need to fire their current IT systems and software provider and employ a more competent provider
I seem to remember the same issue in Despatch Manager Express – the old desktop software version that was replaced by DMO.
So frustrating to type the address, click the box and find out you had to type the darn address again!
Hi Dave, this is something NetDespatch might be able to help with. We’re an alternative to DMO and our platform can handle foreign characters for Royal Mail International (we also support their domestic services too), as well as all the new 2D barcoded label requirements. Any help, advice or solutions you get from us are free-of-charge as we work with Royal Mail to help their customers, such as yourself. If you would like to see how we’ve helped many other Royal Mail customers, have a look at our website (or search for us on Tamebay!).