INTERVIEW Better data, better results Quality data improves efficiency and reduces business errors, leading to enhanced customer experiences, says Melissa’s Greg Brown BY ALICE CHAMBERS Every country formats addresses differently. For example, the building number precedes the street name in Canada but it is placed afterwards in Germany. So, if a marketer takes the same approach when sending promotional mail to prospects around the world, they may struggle to reach everyone. However, if they have access to quality data, they can easily adapt their approach to ensure they reach every individual. “Quality data is data that is suitable and adequate for its intended use,” says Greg Brown, vice president of global marketing at Melissa, which provides address management, data quality and identity verification solutions. “It measures how well a dataset meets the six criteria for completeness, accuracy, consistency, uniqueness, validity and conformity.” Ideally, data should fulfil all six criteria but often does not. For example, the data may be complete or accurate but inconsistent. “Having clean, accurate data is important because it helps organisations to make better decisions, save money and comply with regulations,” says Brown. “Inaccurate customer data can lead to undeliverable mail, which wastes postage, materials and time. Meanwhile incorrect shipment details cause delays and frustrate customers.” While inconsistent data creates siloes and inefficiencies, manually correcting errors is both timeconsuming and costly. “Data quality is important because customer data is always in flux,” says Brown. “Over 33 million Americans move each year, 37 million phone numbers are recycled annually and 10 per cent of customer records in the average database are duplicates. In the course of just one year, approximately 25 per cent of the customer data in a system will be out of date or incorrect.” Consequently, address verification is central to many organisational activities – from customer delivery to effective sales and marketing efforts, says Brown. “Address verification tools that are available include real-time address verification and address autocomplete and suggestion functionalities.” Address verification works by comparing customer addresses against a comprehensive database of verified addresses, including postal authority data from organisations like the US Postal Service, Canada Post and the UK’s Royal Mail. Melissa’s solution integrates directly with Microsoft Dynamics and Office to automatically validate shipping addresses, geocode addresses and improve the user experience by adding autocomplete to address fields for data entry or sign-up forms. “Instead of manually inputting each component of an address, such as street name, city and postal code, our Address Autocomplete product suggests an accurate, verified address as the user types to reduce the time and effort needed to enter an address by as much as 75 per cent,” says Brown. “This improves website and online application conversion rates, as well as call centre data entry, while ensuring only correct addresses enter your system.” Melissa also has a robust partner programme for system integrators and resellers, enabling them to seamlessly provide data quality solutions to their customers and enhance their service offerings. “We offer training and system integrator certification, access to a developer portal, expedited technical support, pricing discounts and co-branded marketing opportunities,” says Brown. “By equipping businesses with both technology and support, Melissa helps organisations enhance their data quality strategies, ensuring accurate, consistent and reliable customer information.” “Having clean, accurate data is important because it helps organisations to make better decisions” 69
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