A Business Case for Data Cleansing
Data Cleansing / Dedupe Software
Data degradation:
Research by Experian found that during an average day over 41,000 households in the UK are on the move and a further 1,900 people die. Business data such as names, addresses, and job titles will erode at nearly 38% each year. This means that, in a database of 5,000 customers, five entries will change every day.
If you are mailing or phoning people from your database on a regular basis without a data cleansing solution in place, you will inevitably waste money on labour and materials - as well as reduce the effectiveness of your marketing. Potentially more serious is the negative effect on your company image if you are duplicating messages or sending mail to the wrong addresses.
Don’t be duped:
The business climate complicates the matter further. Mergers and acquisitions result in collaborative customer bases which can consist of around 40% duplicated records.
Companies with transactional processes and high customer turnover such as call centres often buy in target lists, and they must ensure their records are not duplicated.
Duplicate customer entries, in particular, are as hard to spot as they are damaging. Imagine if 'Robert Naughton' receives multiple copies of the same company literature addressed to ‘Mr R Naughton’, ‘Bob Norton,’ and ‘Robert Morton’ because your systems failed to recognise each entry as a separate person.
The solution: dedupe software
Manually checking through hundreds and thousands of database entries for duplications such as this is a prohibitively laborious process. Automating it is the only sensible option.
An effective deduplication (or dedupe) software solution can not only cleanse a database in a fraction of the time it would take an operator to manually sort the data but also pay for itself in the first use. Cost savings accumulate through reduced mailing and stationary costs, fewer phone contacts and, most importantly, through increased customer retention and protection of a brand image.
helpIT systems have been developing data cleansing solutions for the last 14 years - ensuring that we have a solution for all requirements. We have twice as many customers in the UK as all our competition put together, and our proprietary ‘fuzzy matching’ technologies deliver class leading matching results.
