Data Integration

We hope that you enjoyed yesterday’s post, the first in our “Test-and-Learn” series. Continuing with the series, today we’ll focus on data integration.

Idea 3: Integrate Your Data to Understand Your Customer Relationships

Understanding the complete customer relationship goes a long way toward building loyalty and creating satisfied customers. If you have the ability to understand the full extent of what each client is purchasing from you, you can ensure that you are treating them appropriately. Additionally, if you have an idea of what they aren’t purchasing from you, you can cross-sell and up-sell them more effectively.

There are many data integration tools available from the leading data processors. While the offerings can be complex, it’s fairly simple to test to see which bring out the hidden relationships in your data.

Let’s first define Data Integration. We define Data Integration as any process that results in cleaner, more accurate customer and/or prospect data. These processes can range from simple data hygiene tools, such as National Change of Address (NCOA) that have been available to marketers for years, to merge/purge deduplication to relatively new, referential data linking services.

Data Hygiene: This category includes the U.S. Postal Services products available from all of the leading data processing firms, as well as supplementary services often offered in conjunction with the USPS clean-up services.

Merge/Purge De-duplication Services: This is the process of comparing multiple input files and searching for duplicates. Service providers employ either off-the-shelf software or highly customized proprietary logic to maximize data matching. Many can process both consumer and business data in one process.

Other key considerations when evaluating merge/purge providers are: 1) their flexibility in reporting and 2) your ability to customize the matching algorithms. Additional benefits of an effective merge/purge solution are the identification of Prison, APO/FPO and DMA Do Not Solicit addresses.

But the most important consideration when choosing your service provider is their matching ability. Does the selected firm identify the maximum number of duplicates?And, are those duplicates accurate?

Referential Linking: Referential data matching is offered by data compilers that maintain a reference database of historical and current views of a customer, such as prior addresses, aliases and other name variations. These referential linking providers (Experian and Acxiom are the two biggest) use the power of their rich data stores to maximize the accuracy of matching and linking data on disparate databases, thereby providing the view to your total customer relationship.

The primary benefit of Referential Linking is that it assigns a unique and persistent identifier to each record. This persistent ID is vital if you are maintaining a customer/prospect database environment. Additionally, you’ll benefit from additional matches that merge/purge does not recognize. Further, Referential Matching providers also facilitate real-time data access, as they commonly offer real-time data access and matching services.

We’ve put together a comprehensive white paper that outlines all of the tools available to build data quality, and which provides an action-plan on how to use them. We’d be happy to share this with you—just let us know with an e-mail or a comment.